HoraceClarke66: “I Wonder Why Nobody Likes Baseball”—Part 329

 From the mind of Hoss...

So in between the Birds hammering the B-side of our bullpen today—you know it’s a bad game when it’s a Luis Cessa game—I tried switching channels to see if the Mets could somehow take one of three against the TB Rays.

 

No could do. It seems that in New York, at least, the Metsies and the Anonymous Floridians were only being shown on some sort of new baseball streaming channel/service that cost extra money.

 

Even discovering this took sometime, thanks in part to the fact that America’s Paper of Record no longer covers sports. But the really weird thing is that, later on, I couldn’t even find a reference to the final score—not after some extensive searching. The YES Network didn’t even have it up.

 

This is, of course, one more part of the brilliant powers-that-be’s decission to separate and hoard information, which is to be expected now that everyone in America seems to take great pride in discovering just what a greedhead they can be.

 

Maybe it was always thus. And hey, how truly exercised can you get over the fact that you have to pay an extra fee to Apple-++ or HBO to the Third Power, or whoever for the pleasure of viewing a TV cable series that ended five years ago, or maybe yet another superhero movie?

 

But for baseball to join up with this?  Now???

 

Like French generals, the Lords of MLB are always fighting the last war. Back in the day—way, way back in the day—it took them years to even allow radio broadcasts of their games.

 

Who was going to come out to the park, they figured. when you could hear it all over the air, complete with snazzy sound effects, such as rapping a pencil on a table to simulate bat hitting ball?

 

Well, after only about 20 years for most of them, the owners realized that radio actually served as a great advertisement for the game. Then, they were equally reluctant about television.

 

And hey, who knows? The late Roger Kahn actually thought that maybe, at first, the novelty of seeing the game on TV DID keep some people at home.

 

Baseball responded, of course, by annihilating as many nearby minor leagues as they could, so people would have no alternative but to tune in. Hence the sad demise of the Newark Bears.

 

It was, of course, the Prince of Darkness himself, Walter O’Malley, who came up with the idea of how to make money not only from all the ads, but more directly. In the mid-1950s, Walter took up with a company called Skiatron, which promised to put a little metal box in your house that you would have to put a dollar in per game—like poor English coal miners paying for each degree of heat, but in this case to watch the Brooklyn Dodgers play baseball.

What could possibly go wrong with that idea? 

 

I mean, beyond many denizens of Brooklyn taking a baseball bat to the little tin box while yelling, “I got your dollar deposit right here!” after a less-than-satisfying effort by the Bums?

 

It was one of Walter’s few financial missteps. Skiatron went belly-up, and The O’Malley lost several hundred thousand dollars with it.

But that’s the kind of idea that gets you tagged as a baseball visionary by the sportswriters drinking your scotch and eating your steaks for free.

 

Pay-per-view baseball took a little longer. But before long, the Red Sox had moved their games to UHF, then the Braves built their own cable network. All such innovations forcing everybody to pay a little more, just to watch every game.

 

One would have thought the teams starting their own, immensely profitable networks would have satisfied them all. But no. Now we have extra pay channels and streaming services you have to pony up money or at least your personal data for in order to see every game.

 

As it now stands, anyone wishing to see every Mets game—and soon, I am sure, every Yankees game—will have to be able to get the old network channels, the new team channels, the MLB channels, a basic cable package, and all kinds of new streaming services.

 

Commercials plus cable fees or dish, plus special fees, and other really special pay channels or internet fees. 

 

Which we’ll all do, right? Because these days baseball is so incredibly exciting and invigorating? Now really is the time to milk us all for just a little bit more…

 

Why do I have the feeling that all of MLB could be the next Skiatron?