The LA Daily News’ Tom Hoffarth has news so encouraging, it makes the Presidential election results and $1.75 per gallon gasoline seem oh, so trivial : Fox Sports has opted to scrap their Major League Baseball pregame show featuring the evil troika of Jeanne Zelasko, Kevin Kennedy and Eric Karros.

Some of it has to do with the fact that the network lost up to $50 million on its MLB coverage in ’07, no doubt helped along by the less-than-attractive World Series, and that the pregame show hosted by Zelasko and including Kennedy, Karros and Mark Grace, never made money with national ad sales (they were sold by the local affiliates, rather than the national ads that are seen on the Fox NFL pregame show).

Zelasko and Kennedy will be without Fox MLB gigs for next season. Karros and Grace continue as a regional game analyst.

So starting in ’09, Fox will likely have its Saturday MLB games go on the air at 1 p.m., with a 1:07 p.m. first pitch. Having a pregame shows in the past, Fox would come on the air at 12:30 p.m. with first pitch at 12:55 p.m. How this affects the All-Star game and post-season — a sore spot with viewers in the East who don’t see a first pitch until sometime past 8:15 p.m. — remains to be resolved, but it’s likely related to ad sales again.