Let Us Watch The Games
It’s a beautiful holiday weekend in the greater Chicagoland area. In addition to all the fireworks that I’ve seen and all the hot dogs I’ve eaten over the past 24 hours, it also happens to be a great baseball weekend: the St. Louis Cardinals are in town to play the rival Cubs, and the White Sox are in Cleveland facing the Guardians, with whom they are currently tied for first place in the American League Central. Between me (the White Sox fan) and my husband (the Cubs fan, bless his heart), we were up to our eyeballs in appointment television.
Except we can’t watch the games today.
You’d think we could, since we pay a monthly fee to do so. We pay $20 a month for the privilege of watching White Sox games on their network, the Chicago Sports Network (CHSN). We also pay $20 a month so my husband can watch his team’s games on the Marquee Network. In addition, we pay $21.35/month to Xfinity as a regional sports fee so we can watch CHSN and Marquee on our televisions. So we are in $60 deep a month, just to be able to watch our teams play games (and maybe begin to question our life choices.)
Except we can’t watch the games today.
We can’t watch the games today because MLB is airing all baseball games today on NBC’s streaming service, Peacock. You have to upgrade to Peacock’s paid service tier in order to watch these games. It’s going to cost you $11/month to see them there. Well, $17/month if you’d like to see them without ads. There’s an $8/month option, but that excludes live sports. I’m sure there might be a free trial we could sign up for, but that would put the onus on us to remember to cancel the subscription before incurring any charges, which, to be honest, is a pretty surefire way to get $11 or $17 from me.
Upgrade to watch.
This whole completely avoidable circus takes me back to my childhood, standing at the kitchen sink with my huge hockey fan mother, both of us elbow-deep in dishes while she listened to the Blackhawks on the radio. Why the radio? Because Bill Wirtz, the Blackhawks’ owner, decided that letting fans actually watch home games on TV was a bridge too far. Apparently, he thought showing games would keep people from buying tickets. Maybe that makes sense if your team is the hottest ticket in town, but the Hawks were not exactly lighting it up back then. All it did was suck the joy out of the city and leave my mom wishing she could actually see her team play.
In the same way, Major League Baseball has initiated large (and largely ridiculous) blackout rules that restrict local access to televised games. They are intended to increase gameday revenue for owners and their television carrier partners, but they stand in direct conflict with a Brewers fan in Iowa or a fan living in Hawai’i who is hoping to watch really any of the West Coast teams play. It’s not an easy jaunt down to the ballpark for these fans; it’s hotels and PTO. But while the game of baseball itself may be for everyone, Major League Baseball as an enterprise is not. It’s not for the fans, and it’s not for the players. Major League Baseball is for owners and those who can extract value from it.
Over the years, Major League Baseball has tried just about everything to make the game more appealing to casual fans (and, let’s be honest, to pad the pockets of the people in charge): pitch clocks, ghost runners, banning the shift, capping mound visits, making the DH universal, expanding the playoffs every other year. Every single one of these changes was implemented despite plenty of side-eye from both diehards and casuals. But hey, it’s all for the good of the game, right?
It seems like Major League Baseball is willing to try anything to grow the game.
Except let us watch the games.
Which is a very Bill Wirtz thing to do.