You may now alert your relatives that you’ll only be seeing them on a couple of days in October, because the postseason schedule was just released by Major League Baseball. It breaks down thusly:
- Tuesday, October 2: My mom’s 64th birthday. Just thought you should know.
- Wednesday, October 3: Last day of regular season. It will not be as good as the last day of last year’s regular season, though I’m still not ruling out a Braves collapse;
- Thursday, October 4: Any necessary regular season tiebreaker games, broadcast exclusively by TBS. No idea what happens if they have to go all round-robin with this thing. Maybe they’ll invent a day. Blursday or something;
- Friday, October 5: The new one-and-done wild card games. Excitement out the yang! Broadcast by TBS.
- Saturday, October 6: Two of the Division Series will begin. The one with the two division champions (i.e. not the winner of the play-in games) participating.
- Sunday, October 7: The other two Division Series begin, and the already started Division Series continue. The Division Series will run though -- potentially -- Friday, October 12, with Games Fives being played on the 11th and 12th. TBS will air 18 of the 20 Division Series games. MLB Network will do one telecast on Sunday, October 7 and another on Wednesday, October 10.
Note: For this year only, the Division Series begin with two home games for the lower seeds in a 2-3 format. Two road games for the better team to kick off a best of five series! Fun! Fair! It will return to a 2-2-1 format next year with the higher seeded teams starting at home because they have time to futz with the regular season schedule more next year.
- Saturady, October 13: The ALCS begins. Broadcast on TBS.
- Sunday, October 14: the NLCS begins. Broadcast on FOX.
- Monday, October 15: All of the idiot football writers will scrawl out their annual “baseball is dead because the LCS ratings were topped by the Podunk Tech vs. Exploit U. game on Saturday and some boring NFL matchup we’re all going to pretend was interesting on Sunday” columns. Then I’ll copy and paste my usual post about why they’re wrong.
- The potential Game Sevens of the ALCS and NLCS will be on Sunday, October 21 and Monday, October 22, respectively.
- Wednesday, October 24: Game One of the 2012 World Series! It’s in the NL representative’s park (because this time it counts, yo!) and I’ll be there this year because I clearly have something to add to the proceedings. There will be a day off on Friday the 26th, and Game Three in the AL park will be on Saturday, October 27.
- A Game Seven, if necessary, would be played on Thursday, November 1. That’s my dad’s 69th birthday, by the way.
Note II: Even though this could end in November, there is still ONLY ONE OCTOBER!
Note III: The whole World Series is on FOX because God doesn’t love us and hates to see us happy.
Note IV: Her father is the district attorney!!!
Anyway, mark your calendars and stuff.