The TV Obstacle Course

The story of one man’s quest to watch his hometown baseball team…

Last weekend I was house-sitting for some friends and they had some sort of satellite TV that got approximately a billion channels – three of which you might actually want to watch – and I needed to go to night school and take a correspondence course to learn how to use their TV remote, so I found the MLB channel and left it on for three straight days.

(Hey, I’m not the one paying their electricity bill.)

When I came home on Sunday I was looking forward to watching the spring training games I’d seen advertised on the MLB channel, but I have YouTube TV which over the winter apparently got sideways with MLB in a “carriage dispute” and I have no idea what that is, but it sounds like something that would involve the Duke of Edinburgh, the Lady de Winter and an insolent footman. 

In any case…

As of January 31^st, 2023 YouTube TV no longer carries the MLB channel which I didn’t realize until I looked for it, probably because streaming services expend a lot of energy telling you all the great stuff you can watch if you give them your money, but aren’t so eager to tell you about all the stuff you won’t be able to see.

So I looked into it and an article on the internet said efforts are being made to renegotiate the MLB/YouTube deal and I expect all this to be cleared up about the same time the Hatfields and McCoys decide to let bygones be bygones, declare themselves BFFs and move into a condo together.

However…

The article assured YouTube TV viewers they’d still get to watch baseball games on FOX, ESPN and TVS. I didn’t know what TVS was, but according to Wikipedia (OK, so shoot me for not doing better research) TVS is a “syndicator of American sports programming” and is describes as one of several “occasional” national television networks.

I also have no idea what an “occasional” national television network is, but once again according to Wikipedia, TVS went out of business in the year 2000 so now I guess they’re a very “occasional” television network.

The article telling me I could watch baseball on TVS would have to be written after January 31, 2023, but the Wikipedia article said TVS went out of business in 2000, so it sounds like someone needs to spend more time doing research on Wikipedia and its vast collection of possibly true facts.

In any case, games on FOX and ESPN and the possibly defunct TVS don’t solve my problem because I mainly want to watch my local team – the Kansas City Royals – and I’m also out of TVS jokes, so it’s time to move on to another possibility.

OK, so forget YouTube, FOX, ESPN and TVS; how about MLB.TV?

So next I went to the source and checked out MLB.TV which offered me the chance to pay $149.99 (which sounds way less than $150) for a year’s worth of games or maybe I’d rather pay $24.99 a month or maybe I was just interested in a single team (like the Royals) and in that case I could pay $129.99 for my favorite team’s “out-of-market” games.

Say what?

Back to the internet to find out what an “out-of-market” game is, and it turns out it’s a game that’s not on a local network. So if it’s on a local network, which most game are, MLB won’t show it to you even though you paid them $129.99 to watch your favorite team.

MLB also reserves the right to blackout games to “protect their local TV partners” (sounds like baseball fans are on their own) and blackout restrictions are based on geography and “various factors” like your physical location which may be determined by your IP address, birthdate, astrological sign and favorite color, which might explain why I live in Kansas City and occasionally get “local” games blacked out that are taking place in Cleveland.

If you want to find out what games you can’t watch, you can go to this MLB website and type in your zip code, which I did and sure enough I can’t watch the Kansas City Royals unless I’m willing to watch them in an “archived” game which will be available approximately 90 minutes after a game concludes which means I could start watching a four-hour game at about 12:30 AM which won’t work all that well for me unless I become a vampire or develop a crack habit:

https://www.mlb.com/live-stream-games/blackout-mobile

(Just in case you’re interested, the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A’s games are blacked out in Guam even though Guam is 5,798 miles from the Bay Area, a fact I did not make up even though it sounds like I did.)

And now we get to Bally Sports Midwest.

If you like to gamble you can’t do better than Bally

According to an article in the Kansas City Star, Bally Sports network owns the rights to 14 major league teams, including the Kansas City Royals.

Bally operates casinos, but paid for the naming rights for a group of regional sports networks owned by Diamond Sports Group and I guess Bally wanted its name connected to sports to remind you what when you’re watching a game, you could make it even more exciting by also losing money on it.

Which is kind of ironic because baseball used to react like Dracula seeing a cross dipped in Holy Water whenever gambling was mentioned, but after the Supreme Court gave states the power to legalize sports gambling in 2018, pro sports saw the chance to cash in and started having three-ways with bookies and describing them as “partners.”

These days you can’t watch a sporting event for five minutes without seeing ads for FanDuel, DraftKings and whatever that thing is with JB Smoove pretending to be Caesar and now they’ll actually suggest bets you could make on the game you’re watching, all of which must really piss off Pete Rose because he still can’t get into the Hall of Fame because he bet on baseball, which is a completely different article that I may or may not write in the future.

If you want to watch Royals games, Bally Sports network has the rights, but they’re involved in a “financial crisis” and last month Diamond Sports Group, which owns Bally Sports network and is a subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcast Group, recently skipped “about” $140 million in interest payments that were due and skipping those payments started a 30-day “grace period” which might be a prelude to bankruptcy and possibly lead to changes in how games are made available to viewers.

The Commissar of Baseball, Rob Manfred, said Diamond told MLB they intend to pay their baseball teams (like I intend to help pay my friends’ electricity bill) but called it an “unfolding story” that could change.

Manfred also said if Diamond doesn’t make the payments, teams will terminate their agreements and the league will be forced to produce and distribute the games themselves and they might put them on local cable while “streaming” local games, which, if I read the story right, is currently prohibited by the Mann Act or maybe the Volstead Act or the Paris Climate Accords, but the thing to focus on here is that while MLB is assuring Royals fans we’ll be able to see the games, at this point nobody knows for sure who’s going to carry them and who we’ll have to pay to watch them.

If you want to read the Star article yourself, here’s the link:

https://www.kansascity.com/news/article272549997.html

As I write this, Opening Day is just 27 days away and I’m missing spring training games because if I want to watch the Royals games I don’t know who to give my money to, so I feel like I’m waiting to hear the ransom demands of some highly-disorganized kidnappers.

The Royals issued a statement saying:

“MLB has been focused on this and has a variety of contingencies in place to make sure fans have access to our games. We’ve had numerous conversations with MLB, and there is no higher priority.”

Which might make you feel better until you remember these are the same people who put their heads together and came up with three-and-a-half hour ball games where not much happens and were then surprised that fans didn’t want to watch that, which is reflected by the fact that ever since 2007 attendance has been dropping and they’ve lost almost 15 million fans.

The people in charge of baseball had to change the rules – bigger bases, a pitch clock and no infield shifts – to fix the sport they screwed up and now their TV rights are a ginormous mess and if they don’t get this figured out soon I see only one possible solution:

I need to move into my friends’ house.