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Filed on August 15th, 2007 in Baseball, Sports Media ⋅ ⋅

This is a follow up to my original piece on the MLB blackout policy.

OK, so here is the details of the blackout policy, as best as I can figure. The priority for all MLB games goes to the local broadcast. Let’s use an example. In this example, the San Francisco Giants are playing against the New York Yankees (interleague, apparently). The game is scheduled to be on ESPN on a Wednesday night. In San Francisco’s home market and the NY Yankees home market, the game will be aired on the local broadcast station, and ESPN will be blacked out. In the rest of the nation, the game will air on ESPN, and the local broadcast will be blacked out.

Now, let’s ammend that example. Same game, but this time, no ESPN. It is being broadcast on the YES Network in New York, and KTVU-FOX2 in San Francisco. Most subscribers to the DIRECTV Extra Innings package will be able to see this game on YES. Those living in the Giants home market will be blacked out of that broadcast. Those living in San Francisco can watch the game on KTVU-FOX2. The San Francisco home market that is out of the actual Bay Area, will not see the game. It will be blacked out in most of Oregon, Northern California and all of Nevada.

The size of the “local” or “home” market that Major League Baseball has granted to each team is the problem. Home markets should never include a town that is over 1000 miles away (Seattle to eastern Montana). If baseball can right this wrong, that by itself would solve half of their blackout problems. Not every town in the nation (or continent if we include Canada’s blackouts) needs to be in a team’s market. At least not for broadcast purposes.

Here’s my proposal: First, any region that a team claims is in the home market must be provided with a broadcast of any game that is broadcast in the actual home city. If Las Vegas does not provide local broadcast coverage of the Giants or A’s, then those teams cannot claim Las Vegas as the home market. It is up to the teams to negotiate with it’s “market” to determine how far it actually extends. People 1000 miles away should not be blacked out because a non-local team “claimed” them. How are you taking care of your home market by never allowing them to watch your team play?

Second, if you don’t live in the decided market of either team of any game, neither teams television feed should be blacked out. Having the option of watching the better broadcast team should be there, assuming both feeds are otherwise available on DIRECTV. I’m having a hard time envisioning where it would hurt a team financially to not be blacked out out-of-market. If I’m in Phoenix and the Yankees are playing the Red Sox, I want to choose whether to listen to Michael Kay or Don Orsillo. Sometimes that’s an option with Extra Innings, but not always. It should always be an option.

Third, replays of games should not be blacked out. MLB should take a hint from the NFL on this one. The more your product is available, the more people will watch, and the more they’ll be fans. The NFL’s DIRECTV Sunday Ticket has that 30 minute replay of every game during the week. Every game from Sunday is cut down to 30 minutes, while showing all plays in that time. While I concede that it’s not feasable to do this with games played daily like baseball, but when teams air replays at nine in the morning, why in the world should they be blacked out.

To be clear, I’m not attempting to convince DIRECTV that we should all be entitled to anything, but I am saying that if you are going to offer a service that gets you all of the games, I should get all of the games. Extra Innings says that you get up to 60 games each week (depending on blackouts). That’s fine. If certain games aren’t on a DIRECTV channel, or only on local broadcasts, fine, what are you gonna do? But when the game is being broadcast on any DIRECTV channel, everyone with the Extra Innings package should be able to watch that game.

Fourth, no region should be subject to more than one team’s “home market”, unless they are in a region that actually has two teams. Southern California, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York area, DC-Baltimore, Tampa-Florida, or Houston-Texas. There are legitimate reasons to have more than one team in the same market. There are not legitimate reasons for Las Vegas to be in six teams’ home market. Or Iowa is the home market for six teams. Common sense needs to be injected into this discussion.

For two-hundred bucks a year, MLB and DIRECTV need to get together and sort this out. It is unfair to the fans, and the fans are what drive the game. Baseball has already over priced the game itself so much that most people can’t afford to go to the ballpark, and now they’re trying real hard to drive away the fans that are at home. It has not been a great past 13 years for baseball, and they should be catering to the fans. Blacking out games for absolutely no good reason is not catering to the fans.

So, in summary, here are my solutions to the MLB blackout problems: