Baseball and Television: Future
Is there a way forward?
Baseball and Television: Future
I became attracted to baseball when I was still a toddler.
I don’t remember any of it, of course. My parents told me that I would become really excited whenever I would see a game on television. I’d run around with a whiffle ball and bat and would try to imitate what I saw.
I’ve always assumed that there was something about the color scheme that was so attractive to my young eyes. After all, this would have been in the mid-1980s, back when teams still had colorful away uniforms and the sight of neon-green artificial turf was not uncommon.
In contrast, my own children don’t watch sports at all. My youngest has expressed a little bit of interest in sports, but has never asked me to turn on a professional game. My other two children would rather read the Harry Potter books for the 10th time, or watch part 56 of some random YouTuber’s Minecraft adventures.
I suppose it’s my own fault. We don’t have a television service at home, after all. It’s kind of hard for kids to become interested in something that they’ve never been exposed to. I mean, when I was a teenager I had no idea that I had an interest in Tang dynasty poetry. It wasn’t until I was exposed to it years later that I discovered how fascinating and deep it all was. Without exposure, much of the world remains dark and mysterious — and the worst part is that you don’t even know what you’re missing out on.
This leads me to ask: where is baseball’s future?
Overpriced?
Last week’s college football drama led to millions of message board posts and tweets. I don’t have the time to go through them all, of course, tempting as that may be. However, in the war of words and in the mass of spilled electronic ink, I found a few posts that I thought were quite insightful.
The truth is that the cable television networks that pushed forward college football realignment are actually in deep financial trouble.
Don’t believe me? Check out this New York Times article.
Don’t want to read it? Here’s the gist:
Now, I don’t want to get into the ridiculousness of having a sports league own the media franchise that reports on its own games. We’ve actually already moved past that point of ridiculousness, of course, and currently enjoy a world in which sports and gambling are inextricably tied through the magic of television. I suppose we should thank our lucky stars that Disney is not in talks with the MGM Grand about bailing out ESPN.
Instead, let’s focus on the nuts and bolts of the problem:
And this is where the problem lies.
Remember that $3 billion, 10-year deal that ESPN signed to broadcast SEC games starting in 2024? That deal is exactly where the problem lies.
ESPN can afford that kind of money as long as it continues to get $9 or so per month from every single cable and satellite company in the United States. Of course, most of those households don’t actually watch ESPN.
They don’t have a say in the matter, either. Pay television comes in packages, and you get whatever package you choose to pay for. If you want ESPN2, you’ll need an upgraded package. In some places, if you want the channel that hosts your local NBA team, or your favorite college football team, you’re going to have to pay extra to get that. It’s expensive and frustrating for consumers, a legal monopoly that does nothing but inflate the perceived value of sports broadcasts.
It becomes hilarious when you realize that corporate owned apartment complexes offer basic cable bundled with the rent as a “favor” to tenants. Your rent includes an automatic $9 payment to ESPN each month, even if you never install a television set. HOAs are guilty of the same: we came close to buying a house 5 years ago with an HOA that offered a similar “benefit.” It’s hard to cut the cord when you are contractually obligated to keep it attached.
Now, if ESPN finally got with the times and looked for revenue outside this outdated system, it would probably be surprised by how few people actually care to watch the station. Even if you grant that 30% of all cable subscribers watch ESPN (and I doubt that is the case), you soon realize that ESPN simply can’t survive at its current levels without the monopolistic profits it enjoys. Or, as an anonymous Redditor on this excellent thread put it:
Now, it is true that money from advertisers could make the difference. But will it really make up for revenue lost to cord cutters?
I guess the real question here is: how much money is this stuff really worth? Who determines how much money a commercial slot in a regular season B1G game is worth? Who determines how much money the Cincinnati Reds should be paid for the exclusive right to broadcast their games?
By the way, the worst case scenario here should be a cause for concern to sports fans everywhere:
If that apocalypse really comes, I’m not only going to worry about the Pirates and Rays and Athletics. I’ll start worrying about the entire sport of baseball.
Blackouts
That brings us to that age old concept, the media blackout.
I don’t subscribe to MLB.TV. I doubt I ever will. The expense is high — and the archaic blackout policies make it an extremely unattractive product.
The blackout is designed to protect the monopolistic rents we were talking about above. The real money, you see, is not made by providing a streaming service to 700,000 or so local fans who really want to watch the team. No — the real money is made by forcing everybody who has a certain television subscription package to pay the television station regardless of whether they actually watch it.
Is it any wonder that young consumers are deciding to cut the cord? Who in their right mind would want to continue to feed this automatic payment system?
Isn’t this similar to the ballpark problem we talked about last time? Television looked a lot nicer in the late 1940s and early 1950s than going to a delapidated and decaying ballpark in the seedy side of town. There seems to be a trend here of managers clinging on to old, broken models until the bitter end, refusing to make needed changes or to upgrade things as long as possible.
It makes you wonder how long they’re going to be able to hold on to this model before they are finally found out.