Baseball's pitch: There's never enough.(Brief Article)

Too much baseball on TV, right? You can tell because the Nielsens have been on a slope as slippery as the XFL's for years; Fox Family Channel might show divisional playoffs, and the Brewers will be televised 129 times this season (even Bud Selig's daughter shouldn't watch the Brewers 129 times). Surely this evidence warrants an indecent overexposure conviction, and Judge Judy shall impose the maximum sentence: having to watch all 777 installments of DirectTV's $149 MLB Extra Innings.

"I remember growing up in San Francisco, where the number of games televised was 24 a year. That was a big deal," says Jon Miller, voice of ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball. In 2001, the Giants will appear on local TV and cable 127 times. No big deal.

As Miller declares: "We're a culture that feels baseball on TV every night is entitlement."

The year of demarcation was 1990 B.C. (Before Cable), when ESPN first pitched 100 games a year and the number of major league games on the tube exceeded those not. What a boon. Nobody east of Snohomish had seen the Mariners previously. And thanks to ESPN's and Fox's national coaxials, we saw 1998's McGwire-Sosa drama, game-by-game, an impossibility during Maris' pursuit of Ruth until HBO gave the go-ahead to film 61*.

Check your local listings. In 1994, the Padres televised zero home games; in 2001 they'll do 70. Every club, great and small-market, has discovered this multilevel marketing. Even the Expos get $3 million ...