The World Series Stops For Obama?

(Getty Images)
The Obama campaign has done a major TV ad buy scheduled to run on CBS, NBC and Fox-TV on the evening of October 29th, which is the last Wednesday before the election.  The spot will run in the 8-8:30 pm time slot.

The only problem is that the spot runs through the first inning of a potential game 6 of the World Series.  To accommodate the ad revenues from the spot, MLB, with acquiescence from Fox-TV, has agreed to push back the start time of the game about 8 minutes.

I get weary about candidates using prime-time sports air for political ads.  I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think that your average World Series viewer wants to be interrupted with political ads.  I don’t, and I am a HUGE Obama supporter.  Moreover, with a likely World Series between Philly and the Rays, very few people outside of those two markets will be watching the Series (this is Fox’s biggest fear for the Series overall).  I'm not sure that the viewers in those markets are going to cotton to an Obama-based interruption.  An ad will probably just piss-off a lot of sports viewers, not because 8 minutes is such an intolerable amount of time to wait for the first pitch, but because sports viewers look at sports as an escape from all the other crap of their day-to-day lives, and politics is on the top of that list.

But, it probably won’t even be an issue, in the end.  There is no way that the Series is going six games.  The Phillies will win it in four, regardless of whether they play the Rays or the Red Sox.