Baseball and the TV Obstacle Course, Part 2

Today is Opening Day and as of right now this minute I don’t have a TV package that will allow me to see my hometown team – the Kansas City Royals – even though I tried to give MLB and Bally Sports access to my credit card and my firstborn male son on alternate weekends.

But let’s start the story at the beginning – sort of.

I’ve been waiting to find out what streaming service I have to donate a kidney to in order to watch the Royals this summer and then I recently got an email from the Royals saying they’d reached an agreement with Bally Sports Kansas City to show their games this season even though Bally’s parent company – Diamond Sports Group – declared bankruptcy.

Which kinda seems like booking a stateroom on the Titanic immediately after it hit an iceberg.   

But what do I know; I can barely balance my checkbook so maybe the whole thing makes sense in a cryptocurrency “A-Bunch-of-Comic-Book-Nerds-Are-Now-Making-Their Own-Invisible-Money” kind of way I just can’t get my mind around.

Nevertheless: if I want to see the Kansas City Royals I need access to Bally Sports Kansas City.

Meanwhile, I also got an email from DIRECTV asking me to “come back” which was pretty surprising because I’d never actually had DIRECTV so it was a bit like getting a love letter pleading with me to “come back” to a woman I never dated.

Turns out DIRECTV bought AT&T TV which I had subscribed to in order to see the Royals a couple seasons ago, so now it was like a woman you briefly dated sold your contact information to a woman you never met and the woman you never met was asking you to “remember all the good times” you had with someone else.

InDIRECTV

Next I called DIRECTV because the email they sent me offered an “ENTERTAINMENT” package and a “CHOICE” package and the next step up was the “ULTIMATE” package, followed by the most expensive package – the “PREMIER” package – which is a pretty good indication DIRECTV is somewhat confused about the meaning of the word “ULTIMATE.”

So I asked if the “ENTERTAINMENT” package would allow me to see the Kansas City Royals and the first words out of the sales representative’s mouth were:

“What are the Kansas City Royals?”

And now a word about weak links

The late, great, 3-time Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist (and if you were giving Pulitzers to the best political cartoonist each year, he deserved more of them) Jeff MacNelly and I once had a conversation about the newspaper business and the multi-million dollar corporations whose final link in their product delivery system was an 11-year-old with a sack of newspapers riding a Schwinn bicycle.

People at the top of corporations reward themselves handsomely and to have enough money to do that, they need to screw over the people at the bottom of corporations, and since the people at the bottom are paid like crap and often forced to wear demeaning costumes, you don’t often get MENSA candidates when it comes to the employees that deal with a corporation’s customers.

True story:

I was once ordering food in McDonald’s and the guy at the counter taking my order had “Death Before Dishonor” tattooed on his forearm, which made me hope he didn’t start thinking too much about his employment situation before I got my Double-Quarter Pounder and left the premises because I wasn’t 100 percent sure exactly whose death his tattoo referred to.

In a complaint that reveals I eat at Taco Bell way too often: the people taking my order will often tell me they don’t have some item I want and then I have to point out the item on the menu, which means I know what they sell better than the people selling it.

Which if you think about it, is not something to brag about.

On the other hand; it’s difficult to keep up with the Taco Bell menu because apparently they have a kitchen at some secret location in which they take the seven ingredients they offer and conduct experiments – “This time we’ll put a taco inside a burrito” – and then make up some Latin sounding name for the item and then you can order a Loco Tacosito Grande, which they’ll quit making two weeks later.

In any case…

The woman trying to sell me the right to watch the Kansas City Royals hadn’t ever heard of them.  

BTW: I wasn’t aware of this until my son pointed it out, but some “call-center representatives” are actually prison inmates and Unicor – a company that “employs” them – calls it “the best kept secret in outsourcing” to which my cynical offspring said:

“I bet they have bigger secrets than that.”

If you want to read more about the weird jobs prisoners do that don’t include making license plates, here’s an article:

https://nypost.com/2015/06/23/the-seven-weirdest-jobs-that-prisoners-do/

And now back to InDIRECTV

As we’ve already discussed, sometimes people at the bottom of the corporate food chain don’t know their own products so I don’t know if what I was told is accurate, but I do know what I was told:

The cheapest package – the ENTERTAINMENT package – was $74.99 a month but would not include the MLB channel because apparently baseball is no longer considered “entertaining” and when you think about what the Moneyball Revolution did to it, DIRECTV has a point.

The CHOICE package for $99.99 a month would include the MLB channel, but would not include Bally Sports Kansas City.

To get that, I was told I would have to go to DIRECTV’s “ala carte” menu and add Bally Sports Kansas City.  I asked how much more that would be and because she had some strange accent – and possibly because there was a prison riot going on in the background – I couldn’t decipher if Bally Sports Kansas City would cost an extra $13.99 a month or an extra $30.99 a month, so I asked her to tell me how much the whole thing would cost me and the answer was $124.99 a month.   

(Don’t bothering doing the math because at either price, the total doesn’t add up.)

I then asked how much extra for a shiv and a carton of cigarettes and a cushy job in the prison library and hung up.

So if the woman I talked to was correct: to watch Royals games for six months would cost me $749.94 and for that kind of money I’d expect a uniform, a locker and a minimum of four plate appearances.

There had to be a better alternative.

The Bally Sports+ package

One of the possibly better alternatives was the Bally Sports+ package for $19.99 a month and for that I got to watch Royals games, St. Louis Blues hockey games, Oklahoma City Thunder games and “select” games from the ACC which is either the Atlantic Coast Conference or games from the Air Conditioning Corporation softball league, but in either case I still wouldn’t get the MLB channel.

Also, by signing up with Bally Sports I’d be booked in the Titanic’s steerage class with Leonardo DiCaprio and we all know how well that worked out.

But I figured the worst that could happen is Bally Sports would not make it all the way to port and at most I’d lose $19.99 which just goes to show you I have a limited imagination when it comes to “the worst that could happen.”

Like a dummy, I gave all my credit card information to Bally Sports, signed up and was greeted with an email that included a box that invited me to “start watching” so I clicked on that and was asked for my credit card information again which seemed kind of weird because I just gave it to them, but turns out it wasn’t all that weird because without knowing it, apparently I’d also just signed up for something called “Spot Prime.”

I can vouch for the “Spot” part of that name, but not so much the “Prime” because even though all I want to watch are Royals games, now I had access to a wide variety of movies I’d never heard of and when the most recognizable star is Dolph Lundgren, you may not be watching Academy Award Best Picture candidates.

So now I wanted to talk to Bally Sports+ to find out just what the hell was going on and what Spot Prime was, but couldn’t find a phone number or anyone to call, possibly because all their call-center representatives were busy working on a chain gang with Cool Hand Luke.

Instead of being able to talk to a human I was offered the opportunity to have an online “chat” with what might have been a robot or possibly an embezzler with bad luck and when I asked what I had to do to get the Royals games off my laptop and on my TV I was asked:

“What device you have?”

So wherever my call-center representative and/or inmate was incarcerated, English did not appear to be the primary language.

In answer to my question, I was then sent a simple six-step process that involved launching apps, logging in, an FBI background check, recalibrating the Hubble Telescope and entering the square root of the total number of earned runs the Royals bullpen has given up since the turn of the century.

At that point, I gave the fuck up.

I tried to cancel everything, but still may be signed up for “Spot Prime” and if you google “is spot prime legit” you might get led to the following video:

https://www.google.com/search?q=is+spot+prime+legit&rlz

Or this article:

https://www.onlinethreatalerts.com/article/2022/12/5/is-spotprime-net-a-scam-or-is-a-legit-website-spot-prime/

Both of which say it’s a scam and it takes over when you try to sign up for something you actually want. I may also be signed up something called “nolimits-vod.com” which might also be a scam, so now I may have to cancel my credit card which I would need if I wanted to attend Opening Day in person because now you can’t buy a paper ticket or pay cash at the ballpark and everything has to be done through the MLB app online.

In conclusion even though I suspect this story isn’t over…

It seems to me Major League baseball has made their product so goddamn difficult to buy that I’m going to have to find something else to watch on Opening Day.

Like a Dolph Lundgren movie.