Kudos to WXOS for pre-empting a lot of local programming this week to carry coverage of the NCAA Tournament, something it has been doing in recent years.
It’s nice when a station does the right thing and sacrifices revenue generated by its own daytime shows in order to bring its listeners a big national event.
“We have had very positive feedback on it in the past,” WXOS program director Chris “Hoss” Neupert said Thursday.
But it’s too bad 101.1 FM doesn’t follow through with something of much more intense interest to many St. Louisans than the first couple days of the college basketball tournament — the baseball postseason.
WXOS often refuses to bump local daytime shows for baseball playoff games. Particularly galling last season was that it aired local jock jabber instead of the contest that determined the American League’s World Series participant. Making matters even more confounding from a local standpoint was that the AL game involved the cross-state Kansas City Royals, who won to reach the World Series for the first time in 29 years.
There was more — the Cardinals still were alive in the National League championship series, so it was possible that the AL contest 101.1 bypassed could have been determining the local club’s World Series foe. And another twist — it could have been setting up a rematch of the controversial I-70 World Series of 1985.
The Cards ended up losing to the Giants, but still it was irritating not to have the game that decided the AL pennant on St. Louis radio.
WXOS is the Rams’ Radio Network flagship station and Neupert said timing is the problem when the baseball playoffs are rolling in October.
Basketball “only really interrupts two days of normal programming on the slowest sports time of year so demand isn’t as overwhelming as it would be at any other point in the year,” he said. “With the fall and football coverage in addition to MLB postseason commitments (and Sunday and Monday night NFL games) baseball is harder to interrupt local programming. But when schedules are released we look at everything to see what is possible.”
Hopefully, that schedule in October can be worked out this year in order to give the legions of local baseball fans the same opportunity a much smaller college basketball fan base has in March.
Credit to STL Today who originally published this article