There is a minor league baseball game scheduled to start at 10:30 AM on Wednesday between the Toledo Mud Hens and the Indianapolis Indians. Baseball at 10:30 in the am? I know minor league teams travel by bus so I’m guessing one or both of these teams have a long trip that day. But 10:30 am seems like a really strange time to schedule a game. School isn’t even out yet, so I guess the attendance will be around almost zero.
Major League Soccer has a lot of 8 PM kickoffs for weekday games. This seems awful late for a weekday game.
College basketball has a lot of strange starting times too, but they’re designed that way for tv. Teams will schedule their game for 6 AM or 9 PM to get on ESPN.
10:30 (or even 10:00) starts are actually fairly common in the double A Eastern League these days. I have been to a couple of the games played by the New Britain Rock Cats in Connecticut, and I believe they usually do about 4 a year, all in the spring. Several of the other teams in the league do it too. You’re right that they are typically played on getaway days.
Attendance isn’t zero, however, or especially close to it, at least not when I’ve been in the park. That’s actually because school ISN’T out yet. Local schools bring kids to the game as a field trip of sorts. Sometimes the kids are interested in the action, more often they’re not, but they buy concessions and scream loudly, and it’s kind of fun, and it’s a different crowd than you’d get for a weekday night game in April or May, and who knows, the kids go home and say, Hey, that was really fun, can we go again someday?
Also, they did little science experiments between innings at one of the 10:30 games I attended. I don’t know that any of the kids were paying attention, but at least the districts could say they were going to Science Day at the Rock Cats ballpark…
It’s the second game of a three game series, so no - there won’t be a bus ride that day. The Indians usually play Wednesday day games at home (this one is in Toledo), but yeah - 10:30am is a little early. That seems to be the practice in this particular AAA division.
The Barkley Marathons, an extremely sadistic 100 mile ultramarathon, has no fixed start time. Participants camp out at the start area and the organizer kicks things off whenever he feels like it…could be 1pm, could be 3am.
In 25 years only about ten people out of around 700-800 have finished the full 100 miles in the cutoff time of 60 hours.
It is a spring marathon, and some days it has been nicer to let things warm up. The main reason they switched the start time to 10:00 (and 10:20/40 for waves 2 and 3) is the huge number of participants and the logistics of getting people out to Hopkinton. The slower runners were finishing near dark.
The Barkley is just stupid. They like it that way. And his goal is to set up a course that no one can finish. The odd starting time is just part of the mix to keep people off their game. There’s essentially no map of the course, and they randomly change directions of the loops.
You do get a warning of the start. Something like one hour, IIRC.
For a couple of years, the Chicago White Sox started their night games at 7:11 p.m., as part of a sponsorship deal with the 7-Eleven convenience store chain.
The Ali vs Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle” fight was held at something like 2AM local time in Zaire to allow it to be telecast in prime time USA (via closed circuit TV).
In the early days of the marathon, it was always held on Patriot’s Day, no matter what day of the week it fell on. That would have been April 19, to commemorate the start of the Revolutionary War and Paul Revere’s ride, etc. When the holiday went to the third Monday in April, the marathon followed suit and has remained there since. The noon start was mostly for logistics reasons, as getting a bunch of runners from Boston to Hopkinton (or earlier Ashland) was no easy task. Also early spring weather was often better in the middle of the day.
I’m not sure when the Red Sox started doing their early morning start on Patriot’s Day (wiki says 1968 upon checking), but the intention was that the game would finish around 2 p.m. and the fans would stream out into Kenmore Square and watch the runners go by about a mile from the finish. Now that the marathon has an earlier starting time, the marathoners pass Kenmore Square during the middle of the game. I’m hoping that the Red Sox change the game time to around 12:30 or 1:30, so that fans can watch the marathoners finish then go into the game. Not holding my breath though.
The timing worked fine for my pace yesterday, but certainly not the elites. There were plenty of Sox fans out there when I came up to the Citgo sign and I could follow the score along the route.
There was a time in the late 1980s when the Atlanta Braves would start home games at 5:35PM, figuring with a 2 1/2 hour game, WTBS (which carried about 150 games) would have normal shows for prime time at 8:05PM. The Braves were a lousy team in those days.
Of course Ted Turner started much of TBS’s broadcasting at minute 5 or 35 so he could get a separate line in “TV Guide” and other tv listings which were in written blocks and not box graphs.
Of course in Formula 1 where historically races have started at 1PM local, the evil troll Bernie Ecclestone has moved many out of Europe to the Far East and then put pressure on them to run them at night so the European audiences can see them at a decent hour.
Back in the 20s, baseball games routinely started at 3:30 pm. This allowed people to leave work a little early to get to the game (and bankers – who closed at 3 pm – could catch the entire game).
