Baseball’s diminished TV coverage

[aztecmusician]

With the expected bankruptcy of Diamond Sports, the national television visibility of MLB has been reduced. There is limited ESPN and TBS coverage plus a few regional sports networks covering the games, significantly fewer than past seasons.

I just can’t see myself spending $125-300 on the MLB package and their fawning candy coated commentary. I get diabetes just listening to those windbags lionizing mediocre players.

For the sake of MLB, I hope this doesn’t last too long….out of sight, out of mind. Thankfully the Padres have a current RSN which I still get at home.

[junior]

It's a mess right now. The "nationalization" of MLB telecasts is not something to look forward to unless all teams can keep their current Play-by-play announcers. It's bad enough when you get Apple TV "personalities" who really don't know the teams they're covering trying to act like they're all BFFs. And that could be one of the possible solutions through this if the current regional sports networks don't hold up - which apparently isn't a money maker for many of them. I think most fans probably just want to follow their own team - whenever and wherever they're playing and whenever and wherever their fans might be watching.

Seems like there's a few different audiences that need curating, the cable TV crowd, the OTA crowd, and the Streaming crowd - there aren't many easy answers, though the streamers and the cable crowd might work together. It's the out of market and restricted games that create all the commotion - as well they should. When we were traveling in the Four Corners last summer - during the heat of the pennant races - we definitely wanted to see the Padres games. That was almost always relatively easy for us since we could connect through Starlink or an AT&T data plan, use the Bally app, use our Cox cable account to "look local", and sign into the local broadcast feed. But heaven forbid when we stumbled into the Arizona or Colorado markets and somehow forgot the magic voodoo using VPNs and such - to hide our in/out of market location. Who wants to watch announcers who don't know the Padres, and who cares about listening to a has been crapapple like Bob Brenly plodding through a game with his non-stop nonsense. But getting through all of that just to get a local broadcast comes at a financial cost besides just the cost of an app. Folks who've cut the cord get to deal with this all by themselves. And many of them can't. So they just give up. And there are fewer viewers as a result.

I don't have the answer to this problem, but it will eventually affect both the popularity of the game as well as the willingness of owners to put out $$$ for better players. And for those who don't have cable, internet, or "other", and are simply trying to do things OTA … well I think they got left behind a long time ago. And maybe that's why there's some bitterness between the haves and have nots right now. It only feels like it's going to get worse as time goes by, too. I don't think MLB or Apple, or Amazon, or <insert streamer here> really cares about fans, they just want viewers. Small market and teams with very little to attract a national audience will also get left behind. I have a feeling Peter Seidler understands this at a fairly deep level.

[Deleted]

Free MLB.TV to watch on my phone and IPad is still awesome, if you’re a T-Mobile cell user.