WJZ, the CBS O&O in Baltimore, is facing criticism today after cutting away from a Baltimore Orioles game in extra innings to show “60 Minutes” last night.

WJZ cut away from the Orioles-Red Sox game, which was tied in the 15th inning, around 7 p.m. The station directed viewers to MASN, a regional sports network that carried the game in its entirety, via an alert crawl.

“We made the decision to give the vast majority of viewers a choice,” WJZ spokesperson K.C. Robertson told the Baltimore Sun‘s David Zurawik. “Viewers were alerted via a lower-screen crawl before 7 p.m. that those viewers who wanted to see the game’s conclusion should switch over to MASN.” Read more

A failure of the main production switcher at CBS owned-and-operated WJZ in Baltimore last night forced the station to partially re-air “CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley” in place of the 11 p.m. newscast.

The station re-aired the national news program, which airs nightly on WJZ at 7 p.m., for the first seven minutes of the 11 p.m. hour Tuesday. “The station’s main production switcher experienced a critical failure late Tuesday evening,” WJZ spokesperson K.C. Robertson told The Baltimore Sun in an email. “The equipment failure prevented the news broadcast from starting on time.”

The problem was repaired shortly before 11:08 p.m., at which point anchors Vic Carter and Denise Koch took over for an abbreviated version of their regular newscast.