The Philadelphia Phillies and Atlanta Braves opened the 2026 postseason Tuesday with a Game 1 that had almost everything a baseball fan could ask for. What it didn’t have, according to a Sport & State column by Jason Foster, was a start time that let anyone actually watch it.
Atlanta took the opener 5-3 at Truist Park, in a game that started at 2:15 p.m. ET and wrapped a bit before 5 p.m. — squarely in the middle of the school and work day, and just as traffic was clogging the highways in both Philadelphia and Atlanta. According to the column, only the 30,127 fans who bought tickets saw the whole thing in person. Everyone else was left to steal glances at a phone when a boss or teacher wasn’t looking, and they’ll get to do it all over again for Game 2 on Wednesday.
A pitcher’s duel, then a late swing
For much of the afternoon, the story was the mound. Two left-handers traded innings in a classic pitchers’ duel: Atlanta’s Chris Sale, a future Hall of Famer, against Philadelphia’s emerging ace. Sale struck out Bryce Harper — another future Hall of Famer — with a 100 mph fastball, one of a career postseason-high nine strikeouts on the day.
The bats eventually showed up too. The game featured multiple lead changes, and the biggest arrived in the eighth inning, when Braves third baseman Austin Riley launched a three-run go-ahead homer that Foster described as the biggest hit of Riley’s season — and his biggest in years. The blast sent Truist Park into a frenzy and stood up as the difference.
The scheduling complaint
The larger grievance in the column isn’t with anything that happened between the lines. It’s with how Major League Baseball slotted its four-game Tuesday slate. The 8 p.m. ET window went to Red Sox-Yankees, and the 10 p.m. window went to Cubs-Padres on the West Coast — neither of which anyone could reasonably dispute. The sticking point is the 5 p.m. ET slot, which went to the AL Wild Card matchup between the White Sox and Astros, two teams that averaged 82.5 wins between them and, per the column, wouldn’t have made the playoffs at all in the National League. Phillies-Braves, the argument goes, should have had that window instead.
The counterargument is market size: Chicago is the third-largest TV market in the country, Houston sixth, against Philadelphia’s fifth and Atlanta’s seventh. Foster acknowledges those numbers and dismisses them anyway, noting that a market’s size isn’t the same as a team’s popularity or its quality — and that the Phillies and Braves were the better teams, with the more compelling matchup, before a single pitch was thrown. The game turning into a thriller only reinforced the point, in his telling.
Sport & State founder Clay Travis was blunter about it, saying in a clip shared by the outlet: “Shame on you, Major League Baseball. This can’t happen.” The outlet noted that the Phillies and Braves were scheduled for the same early start on Wednesday and Thursday.
There’s a structural reality here that the column concedes: with four games on the schedule, one of them had to take the early slot, and two fan bases were going to be unhappy no matter how MLB arranged things. The league does weigh broadcast windows, time zones and expected draw when it builds the schedule. The complaint is that the calculation produced a worse outcome than it needed to — and that baseball’s best product on Tuesday was hidden behind a weekday afternoon.
What the players think
The guys in uniform, by all accounts, aren’t bothered. Postseason adrenaline tends to make start times irrelevant, and Sale made that case himself after his first playoff appearance since 2021.
“I could have pitched this game at 8:15 this morning,” Sale told reporters, describing himself as popping out of bed like a character in a scary movie. He added that the unusual schedule made the day feel strange — normally a night game means waiting around all day, but this time, he said, it felt like it was already 5 o’clock by the time he started getting ready to run out onto the field.
His teammates won’t lose sleep over the afternoon starts, and neither will the Phillies — figuratively, at least. As the column notes, they’ll all have to wake up earlier than usual for Games 2 and possibly 3. A win is a win in October, and teams don’t much care how it arrives.
Atlanta got a good one Tuesday. The fans who missed it have the schedule to thank.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/phillies-and-braves-gave-us-quite-a-show-in-game-1-too-bad-mlb-made-it-hard-to-watch