It looks like Boston Red Sox fans have a better shot at going to sleep at a reasonable hour next year.
Ahead of the abbreviated 2020 season, the team tried to experiment by pushing the typical first pitch time from 7:10 p.m. ET back 20 minutes.
But it looks like the Red Sox are scrapping the later 7:30 p.m. ET starts.
“I can tell you that we will not have 7:30 start times,” Red Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy on Tuesday said during a Zoom press conference. “They will be earlier than that. Whether it’s 7:05 or 7:10, we will have an announcement on that.”
The team’s test run at a later start this season was in hopes of maximizing viewership and listenership for people at home during the pandemic.
Kennedy on Thursday expanded on the club’s decision to begin earlier on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show.”
“We talk about scheduling issues each and every day,” Kennedy said. “The 7:30 experiment was designed to try and capture the largest television audience possible and, given the way the team has played, given maybe the nature of the pandemic with people being home more, perhaps that wasn’t the right decision. We’ll see as we go forward here.”
We’ll see how next season goes.
