Do they have to keep showing New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox on TV?

Next Tuesday night, there are a number of MLB games with big playoff implications. The Rangers and Blue Jays, half a game apart in the battle for the last Wild Card in the American League, meet in a pivotal battle. Other games that matter in big ways for the playoffs are Miami at Milwaukee and Tampa Bay at Minnesota. In fact, part of the selling point of the expanded MLB playoffs is that in nearly every game this late in the season, at least one team is fighting for something.

Which of these crucial games is TBS showing on the national broadcast Tuesday night? Well, none of them. Instead, we get the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. That’s right, the two worst teams in the AL East will be filling our screens yet again with another of their four-hour, 8-5 yawners.

On Thursday night, Fox has regional action, divided between a fairly important game between the top two teams in the AL East, Tampa Bay and Baltimore, and the same Yankees-Red Sox drudge. Guess how much of the country will get to see the Rays and the Orioles? If you’re more than a hundred miles from either of those stadiums, you’re likely getting New York and Boston.

There are plenty of other choices besides a New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox game

I get that there’s an NFL game on that night, and that baseball will be fighting for a small sliver of leftover viewers who can’t access Amazon Prime … but there are a lot of fun teams to watch this year. Ronald Acuña Jr. is a good bet to do something spectacular anytime he takes the field. Julio Rodriguez is as hot as anyone has been in a long time. There’s still Shohei Ohtani to awe us (if he can overcome his oblique injury), even if his team is collapsing around him. The Wild Card races are crazy, with four teams bunched within 2.5 games in the National League, and three teams fighting for two spots in the AL.

New York and Boston? Well, FanGraphs gives Boston a 4.2% chance of making the postseason, which is about the same chance that you or I would have of making a basket from halfcourt. The only drama left for the Yankees is whether Gerrit Cole wins a Cy Young and whether the Yankees finish in last place for the first time since 1990, which is tied for the longest streak in MLB (oddly enough, with the Cardinals, whose streak also seems poised to end).

In other words, this won’t be very exciting  The Yankees are giving semi-regular at bats to guys named Billy McKinney, Willie Calhoun, and Jake Bauers. This is not a team that’s going to cause a space problem in Monument Park. It’s not a great team that just had a down year. It’s an average team with average talent. Know what happens to average teams? They finish .500, just where the Yankees find themselves.

Except that this average team keeps getting on national TV. In the heat of a pennant race, when MLB has a golden opportunity to show the world the most exciting teams and races, when they actually configured the playoff system just to create the sorts of games that will be played all next week all over the country … and we get to see Yankees and Red Sox for the 685th time.

Just to make it interesting, let’s take bets on whether they mention Babe Ruth, Bucky Dent, or 2004 most often. Because nothing that will be happening on the field will matter to anyone.