How convenient Sometimes you get just what you don't want BY SAM PFEIFLE

What’s that tired old Stones phrase? "You can’t always get what you want"? Hah! Hardly ever when it comes to the business of sports. And, should you exhibit passion for what you want, it’s even less likely you’ll get it.

The most glaring example of this came with the announcement of the start times for this week’s playoff games between the Red Sox and the Oakland A’s (grammar note: The apostrophe does not stand to make A plural, rather it takes the places of the missing letters "thletic"). The opener, on Wednesday, was scheduled for 10 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Pacific.

Forget, for a moment, that most of the playoff games will only be broadcast on cable television’s ESPN (Thursday’s Sox game on the even-more-obscure ESPN 2), and thus inaccessible to the rational among us (not me) who don’t feel the need to poison ourselves with 62 channels of rubbish in order to get ESPN. That’s a given in this day and age.

Forget, too, that there are three games scheduled for Wednesday, all on ESPN, spaced three hours apart, meaning that there is guarantee of overlap. No way a playoff game, with all the commercials ESPN will sell inserted, gets done in three hours. So they’ll split-screen for a while. Or start the next game on ESPN 2, then switch over. None of the plans are good ones.

Forget, even, that the television networks have granted the Yankees an extra day off on Wednesday so that the networks aren’t forced to broadcast four games that day. If they grant the Red Sox that day off, there’s no Burkett-or-no-Burkett decision to be made. But the Red Sox don’t play in the all-powerful New York TV market, so, of course, the Yankees open the playoffs on Tuesday, then play again on Thursday and Saturday, while the Sox fly to the West Coast, play a game at 7 p.m. (which feels like 10 p.m.) then wake up to play a game the next day at 1 p.m.

No, what’s really ridiculous is that all of this is done so that I, the insatiable baseball fan, have the opportunity to watch all of these games, yet, in reality, I will only watch one of them, and that one grudgingly. And, they could have started the Cubs/Braves at 1 p.m., Giants/Marlins at 4 p.m., and Sox/A’s at 7 p.m., but they chose not to. Why? It’s unfathomable. The Yankees/Twins game starts at 1 p.m. on Tuesday.

Not to mention that all Fox games start at 8 p.m., so local affiliates won’t lose the big bucks they make from selling ad time during The Simpsons and Seinfeld.

Heaven forefend they schedule any of these games at times when the most amount of fans want to see the game. There is no denying that the Red Sox have the second biggest national and international fan base, and they may even be bigger than the Yankees. Sox fans regularly outnumber home-town fans in places like Tampa, Baltimore, Toronto — even Oakland. Yet Cubs/Braves, featuring an Atlanta team that can’t even sell out their own stadium for the first round of the playoffs, gets prime-time billing, and the Sox play at 10 p.m. on the East Coast.

You know why? Because the Cubs and Braves both have deals during the regular season with cable channels that reach a national audience. So, FOX and ESPN figure they have the most casual fans, and will therefore do best in Prime Time, when they’re up against the West Wing and whatnot. They know they’ll get their fans of the Sox and Yankees (that’s right, even the Yankees fans get screwed) to bag work or stay up late.

Sure, it’s all done for ad sales and ratings, but I don’t even think they understand how to maximize their ratings. Rather than gamble on West Wing vs. Cubs, wouldn’t you go for the sure bet of the Sox? The average Sox fan, the average baseball fan, definitely can’t get what they want.

Major league sports suck anyway, you say. The whole reason you came up with "Game on" was to highlight sports that people actually play: wiffle ball, foosball, disc-golf, cross-country skiing, soccer. These are games that people play. Surely they’re not impacted by money.

Well, take a look at the brand-new Portland Sports Center, opening in November out by Joker’s. Sure, it’s something the Portland area needs desperately. Yes, I’m going to probably play soccer there instead of driving all the way down to Howard Sports in Saco. But I may not like it.

You see, I’m not getting what I want.

Portland Sports Center is offering soccer, indoors, with a "no dasher board design." They act like this is some kind of wonderful thing. They’re bringing you the outdoor soccer experience inside, with touchlines and big field dimensions.

Whoopty shmoo. What if you actually wanted to play indoor soccer? Imagine that. Indoor soccer is very much its own game, with different strategy and requiring a different skill set. Plus, with boards, there are very few stoppages in play, and so the 25-minute halves actually approximate the same amount of running and conditioning you get outside with 45-minute halves.

Boards give you a finite field, however. And under the big Portland Sports Center dome, they want to be able to have flexibility, and offer baseball, flag football (their boring version of it, anyway, watered down to avoid liability), field hockey, and ultimate Frisbee all in the same space. That makes boards impossible.

So, too lazy to drive, I’ll play outdoor soccer inside at Portland Sports Center, using my frustration at the ball going out of bounds far too often, and at the realities of the business world, to fuel my competitive fire.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com