Are You Ready For Some...Baseball?

Then it must be Monday night.

If you’re only a few years younger than me (45), and especially if you aren’t up on your pop culture history, you probably have no idea what a cultural phenomenon Monday Night Football used to be. Nowadays, it’s just another football game in primetime, no big deal. They have them practically every night of the week now— Sunday, Monday, Thursday, Saturday, and sometimes Friday. And that’s just the NFL. But that wasn’t always the case.

If I’m being honest, I’m actually too young* to have witnessed MNF’s true peak. I’m talking about the ‘70s and early-‘80s, the days of Earl Campbell running like a wild beast in those glorious Houston Oilers uniforms^ and the Steel Curtain and when the Raiders were still actually intimidating. This was when the iconic Howard Cosell was on the mic, such a staple of American media that most people got the tragic news of John Lennon’s assassination from him in the middle of a Patriots-Dolphins game.

*I’m too young is something I don’t get to say very often these days.

^To this day, I still have my powder blue Velcro Houston Oilers wallet from when I was a kid. It’s in a box of keepsakes, and I don’t actually use it, but don’t think I’m not tempted some days.

I came along after that, when Al Michaels, Frank Gifford, and Dan Dierdorf manned a three-person booth. MacGyver was the lead-in, but I was never as big a fan of that show as many of my friends, so I’d watch The Fresh Prince of Bel Air on NBC instead. Then I’d switch over to ABC to catch Hank Williams Jr. start every game off with a version of “All My Rowdy Friends are Here on Monday Night” tailored to specifically promote that night’s matchup.

That song was a banger. Hank Williams Jr. wasn’t really my thing when I was a kid. Frankly, growing up in a rural community, I was extremely anti-country music. I’ve come around to classic country as I’ve matured, which is probably why the new knock-off country song NBC hired Carrie Underwood to perform for Sunday Night Football, which has usurped MNF as the game of the week in recent years, sounds so horrible to my ears.* Give me Hank any day of the week. Or even better, Chris Farley impersonating Hank, which is what I think of every time I hear that song anyway.

*The SNF song reminds of The Last Boy Scout. That movie tried to rip off Hank Jr. in its opening sequence too, and it’s hard to say which one feels more sterile and phony. But only one of them has the excuse of being in a movie.

The decline of Monday Night Football can probably be traced to hiring Dennis Miller as the color analyst. Maybe that’s unfair, but it certainly wasn’t a good omen for the future. From Saturday Night Live parodying Miller (a one-time SNL cast member), Michaels, and Dan Fouts in the booth to the “Boogermobile*” to a string of incredibly dull matchups, MNF devolved into a joke. The quality has stabilized in recent years, but it’s not even on ABC anymore, having been relegated to ESPN.

*The Boogermobile was this ridiculous cart Booger McFarland used to patrol the field when he was a sideline reporter. Truly awful.

But what about Monday Night Baseball? Did you even know that such a thing existed? Well, it did, and it actually predated MNF, and followed a somewhat similar trajectory without ever reaching the same heights.

NBC was the first to air baseball on Monday nights in the ‘60s and early-‘70s, but it migrated to ABC in the mid-‘70s to form a natural package with its football counterpart. ABC leaned into this connection, right down to the three-man booth, originally composed of Bob Prince, Bob Uecker, and Warner Wolf. Over the years, numerous announcers manned the mic on Monday nights, but the only one who I really remember was Al Michaels, and that probably has as much to do with his MNF tenure as anything.

Monday Night Baseball occupies a hazy spot in my memory, in general. I was only around for the last four years of its broadcast television tenure, from 1985-88, but it did make an impact on my consciousness. I can’t recall any specific memories from it, but I do remember looking forward to it and enjoying it whenever my parents agreed to turn the living room television over so I could watch it. I didn’t get a TV in my room until right about the time it went off the air.

The NBC Game of the Week on Saturday afternoon and Monday Night Baseball were the only chances I had to watch the Royals play a home game during my childhood. Blackouts meant the local stations only carried road games, and there were no regional sports networks back then. Theoretically, it was possible to see them on ESPN, but we didn’t have cable out in the sticks, so unless I was at my grandparents’ or my cousins’ house, that wasn’t an option. The Royals didn’t make frequent appearances anyway, but they were good enough to warrant the occasional spotlight, and that was always a big deal in my circle.

But as I alluded, it didn’t last long. Monday Night Baseball never caught on quite like its football counterpart. A lot of that had to with the nature of the sport, in my opinion. Football is a weekly event, whereas Monday Night Baseball was just another ballgame in a daily 162-game marathon. ABC attempted to salvage it by moving it to Thursday night in 1989, but the same problem persisted.

ABC pulled the plug after the 1989 season, and just like MNF, Monday Night Baseball migrated to cable and ESPN. At first, these were just occasional games to supplement Sunday Night Baseball and Wednesday Night Baseball, but ESPN bumped it up to regular programming from 2006-2021. Unfortunately, as ESPN continues to cut back on its baseball coverage, it was axed for good, leaving only Sunday Night Baseball to carry the banner for MLB.*

*Of course, even that will come to an end after the 2025 season. For more on what that might mean in the bigger picture, I will refer you back to what I wrote about the divorce between ESPN and MLB in my NL season preview.

Sunday is now the marquee sports night on TV, it would seem, supplanting Monday in both baseball and football. As football continues to expand its footprint across the weekday calendar, it runs the risk of encountering the same problem as baseball. Too much supply is bound to decrease demand.

Not that the NFL needs to worry too much. The league practically prints money, and I don’t see it running into financial trouble anytime soon. Oversaturation isn’t threatening its bottom line, but it is fair to ask if it is devaluing its product. The decline of Monday Night Football seems to suggest that it is. Could the unthinkable happen? Could Monday Night Football actually get canceled?

I think we’re a long way from that. But if it does happen someday, it won’t come out of left field. The warning signs are there, and they need only look at Monday Night Baseball as a kind of cautionary tale. Of course, maybe the opposite will happen instead, and some TV exec will decide to give baseball another shot.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d watch that.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. Do you have any memories of Monday Night Baseball? Or the glory days of MNF? I know KC sports fans of a certain age can throw out some gridiron classics, like the iconic Montana-Elway duel at Mile High. Share what you got in the comments.