Comebacks we'd like to see: #7 -- Day baseball during the playoffs

This post is part of our series ranking the top 25 bygone products and trends we'd like to see return.

By guest blogger Mike Brewster

I remember that Bucky Dent's home run came at precisely 5 p.m., because that's when the Ashlines ate dinner every day. Dent's home run off of Mike Torrez gave the Yanks a 3-2 lead over the hated Red Sox in their 1978 one-game playoff, and I ran to call my best friend and Sox fan extraordinaire George Ashline to gloat. He was shell-shocked: "Yeah, I saw it. But I can't talk. My mom's putting dinner at the table."

That game, and Dent's legendary home run, is one of my greatest sports memories and one of George's most painful. But we have that shared memory only because, at 11 years old, we were awake to watch it.

Kids today aren't that fortunate. The day game has virtually disappeared in the baseball playoffs, and is indeed extinct in the World Series -- all in the name of extracting the most advertising revenue from television. According to Wikipedia, the last outdoor World Series game to be played in the afternoon -- East Coast time -- was game five of the 1984 World Series between the Tigers and the Padres, and in 1987 the final World Series day game was played in Minnesota's Metrodome.

Perhaps there's a silver lining. My eight-year-old daughter Lucy wasn't awake to watch the Yanks flame out versus the Indians last October, and the effects of the loss seemed muted on her eight hours later when I told her about it. Still, when the day comes when the Yanks do win their next title, it would be nice to celebrate the final out with her.

As for me, you might be wondering whether ol' George called me after the Red Sox completed their historic 4-3 series comeback against the Yankees in 2004. I'm not really sure, because I was fast asleep by the end of game seven.

Would you like to see baseball return to day games during the playoffs?