The game starts when?

According to ESPN, I should be watching the All-Star game on FOX right. It says it starts at 8. And yet, as I type this, it's 8:40 pm and Joe Buck and Tim McCarver (shudder) are just launching into their pre-game analysis that might lead us to the start of the game in the next 10-15 minutes. Maybe.

This situation illustrates a couple of my current biggest pet peeves in sports coverage. First of all, is the fact that, for most bigtime sporting events, it's very difficult to discern when you should start watching if you're only interested in watching the game or match, and not the overblown, drawn out pre-game melodrama. It's quite frustrating. And this leads me into my second pet-peeve, the fact that the networks and the pro sports leagues seem determined to make it so that no major sporting event (the Super Bowl seems to be the lone exception) ends before midnight on the East Coast. It's ridiculous. Look, I'm not unreasonable. I concede that stuff like this needs to start relatively late by East Coast standards to afford our West Coast brethren the opportunity to watch games. That being said, could we actually get a game like this started before 9 pm ET? It's rather insane. If you start a baseball game at 8 o'clock, that means that West Coasters are rolling home just in time to catching the early part of the game, and East Coasters have a fair chance of being able to turn off their TV before the AM hours while still seeing all of the game. And let's be realistic here - which is a larger issue: Millions of West Coast viewers missing the opening few minutes of the games, or millions of East Coasters nodding off before the end of the games? Given that the result is the important thing, it would seem fairly obvious to me that the later is the more significant issue.

Now, this is the All-Star game, so I don't really care that much. But the NBA Finals, the World Series, etc are different matters entirely. The All-Star game had it right with it's "scheduled" start time of 8 o'clock. Now, if we could just actually START the game at that time.