This is a continuation of the letter immediately below.

Of course I know why they do it this way--"Prime Time" advertising rates and West Coast start times--but they have it backward. Instead of wanting to ensure that a bunch of people see the beginning of the game, they should care about who sees the *end* of the game.

In terms of running their business today, Fox doesn't care if you're watching the beginning of the game, the end of it, the middle or the pregame show. It's just measuring viewers during certain time periods, and it wants to maximize that number. If starting the game earlier meant more viewers at the times -- of the schedule, not the game -- that Fox cared about, it would start the game earlier.

Now, I agree it's damaging to baseball's future to have people not seeing the ends of games, and it's particularly damaging to baseball's future to not have kids watching them at all. But you have to remember, Fox doesn't care about baseball's future. If baseball fades, Fox will bid less on the next contract, or won't bid at all. Fox loses money on baseball anyway. It uses it to advertise its other shows. If it becomes a bad vehicle for that purpose, Fox will find another, same as it would drop ads in a newspaper whose circulation crashed.

Baseball and Fox will both tell you that start times are decided by Fox "in consultation with Major League Baseball." That means baseball says "What time you want the game to start?" and Fox answers.

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How do we get the ratings anyway? How outdated is the way the numbers are generated?

Good questions. Remember what happened to the music charts when Billboard (I think it was) switched from record stores reporting sales to figures collected from bar-code scans. (They changed, a lot, and hip-hop was revealed to be much more popular than previously thought.) But the way we get the ratings, from the Nielsen Company, is the best way we have at the moment.

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As to the Fly over, I�1⁄2ve noticed that it has bled over into the long and storied history of the letters section of Kaufman. I usually see six or seven pages of email by this time of day.

lezzbo, what does this mean?

You have funny apostrophes.

Hey, you don't know me well enough to say that!

I'll ask what's making them look funny on some letters. I suspect it happens when you paste copy in from a word processing program like Microsoft Word that employs "smart quotes" or "curly quotes" or some such thing.

at SALON content is merely a pawn - it's the window dressing that's King.

And, oddly, King is window dressing.

I agree that the horizontal HR line is stupid. But it should be noted that there IS one at Fenway, though it's not exactly the same thing. The wall at least changes angle at that point. It's in center.

Your idea's good Ryan. I was also thinking they could paint the HR part of the wall with something that would come off on the ball. If there's a blue smudge on the ball, it's a HR.

And after that failed squeeze, a single would have won the game. Biggio would have been on second.

I don't know, folks. When Taveras was walking to the plate I was thinking, "He has no chance against El Duque." Of course I could have been wrong, but as it happens I wasn't. He's not a good hitter. He's had a couple of nice swings recently, but he's a bigger threat bunting.

I'm not sure it's true that the likelihood of scoring a single run is less with a man on second and one out than with a man on first and no outs. I don't think so. The total expected runs is lesser there, but the expectaction of a single run, I'm pretty sure, goes up. And I would think that would be more true the weaker a hitter is, which is why pitchers bunt even on teams that don't bunt.

This is the last Editor's Choice letter for this column. From now on this thread won't be moderated.

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