Game 1 of the World Series (7 p.m., Fox) airs tonight. The ratings for the baseball playoffs have been down again this year. And it’s not only because the exciting games between the Diamondbacks and Rockies aired way too late to be watched by many on the East Coast.

Not to go all “Reaper” on you here, but Major League Baseball and the networks that broadcast October games made a deal with the devil a long time ago, and that contract has come due.

For too many decades now, the networks have forced nearly every postseason game, and too many seasonal games, to be broadcast at night. This may have earned the networks some prime-time advertising dough, but it meant that the games aired too late for children – the fans of tomorrow – to watch them.

Tonight the Fox crew will start at 7 p.m. and jabber on for a good quarter of an hour to make way for beer ads and spots for pickup trucks. The action will unfold at the languid pace of baseball and 9 p.m. will arrive before the end of the fifth inning.

Today’s 10-year-olds probably won’t have their magic baseball moments. They’ll be dragged off to bed long before the seventh-inning stretch. Or perhaps they’ll already be up in their rooms, reading “Harry Potter” or slaying strangers on “Halo.” So the World Series will never have meant anything to them at all.

Tonight’s other highlights

¢ Chuck seems smitten by a plane-crash survivor on “Pushing Daisies” (7 p.m., ABC).

¢ Scheduled on “Wired Science” (8 p.m., PBS, check local listings): Do Kansas’ wheat fields harbor rocks from outer space? Also: manufactured organs, neutrinos, marketing cloned food and pilotless aircraft.

¢ Addison can’t get Pete out of her thoughts and dreams on “Private Practice” (8 p.m., ABC).

¢ “Ghost Hunters” (8 p.m., Sci Fi) returns to Salem, Mass.

¢ Nick meets the family’s deadly rival on “Dirty Sexy Money” (9 p.m., ABC).

Cult choice

Director Tim Burton blends the macabre and the festive in his 1993 animated feature “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (7 p.m., Disney).