Major League Baseball Needs To Fix Its Blackout Problem

And I'm not the first one to say it. Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports (making fun of that exclamation point will seriously never get old) tackled the issue yesterday, and he agrees.

This has long been a problem for Major League Baseball's fans, especially for slightly out of market fans whose games come through regional television sometimes, but not always. This can be incredibly frustrating for oh, Cubs fans in Indiana, or Braves fans in Louisiana. You get the point.

The good news? Passan reports that the MLB is starting to take a hard look at blackouts and the problems they cause:

MLB president Bob DuPuy [pictured right] plans to officially address the blackout troubles in front of the sport's powerful executive council two weeks from today at the quarterly owners meetings in New York. How seriously the eight-man council treats the concerns will go a long way toward proving whether baseball is serious about rewriting its archaic rules or simply raising the issue to muzzle all of the fans who are not allowed to buy the product baseball is selling.

... Well, in theory at least. The reality is much different. Some areas are blacked out from 40 percent of the games on a full schedule. No one in Iowa can watch the Brewers, Cardinals, Cubs, Royals, Twins and White Sox. Las Vegas has its own hexagon of darkness with the A's, Angels, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Giants and Padres.
Think about that. Baseball, which has made billions of dollars through MLB.com and its national television packages by knocking down the barriers that prevented mass consumption, is more than happy to ignore its own Great Wall.

Unfortunately, those rules don't make sense anymore, as Passan says. It's time for the MLB to move out of the Dark Ages like the rest of us, and open up the game to fans who seem to be desperately craving it.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

5-03-2007 @ 11:19PM

pete dukoski said...

The feelings are equally strong in FL where we pay $190 for the MLB package, in particular the YTES network for Yankee games, and were continually blacked out because of the Devil Rays. Why? Few care for the Devil Rays and we should receive what we pay for...nothing more. MLB has it rigged.

5-04-2007 @ 1:14AM

chuck said...

I am moving to the tampa area of florida soon, and found out that the yankees are blocked from the yesnetwork...it's over a 1000 miles away

5-04-2007 @ 11:14AM

Rick Mundy said...

You're right. Nobody wants to watch the Devil Rays, unless the choice of viewable games is either them or the Yankees. I would watch paint dry before I would watch the Yankees. What a bunch of shit Yankee fans are, and I would shut the TV off before I would watch those scumbags of "The Boss". porky

5-05-2007 @ 2:17AM

Ward Drew said...

I Live in Las Vegas, NV. Six teams of the thirty MLB teams (Dodgers, Padres, Diamondbacks, Angels, Giants and Atheletics) consider this part of Nevada as their territory. That is 20% or 1/5th of MLB teams. So you can imagine the Blackout restrictions I go through. Especially being a Yankee and Mets fan. Something wrong with this picture?

5-05-2007 @ 9:27AM

ivan said...

all u sorry yankee fans need to shut the hell up and go back to new york if u dont want to watch the devil rays then pack youre stuff up and go back to dirty new york