We Wuz Robbed
If baseball is going to abandon the poor, then I’m going to abandon baseball.
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With people dying in Ukraine, the overturning of Roe V Wade, and the diminishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the fate of baseball in America may seem like a trivial concern. But after a hard week of fighting the fight for climate remediation, social justice, and economic equality, I was more than disappointed to learn that I would be unable to watch Friday night’s Mets game without a subscription to NBC Peacock. It wasn’t just the loss of my weekly relaxation ritual. It felt to me as if the privatization of baseball represented the final surrender of our shared values and experiences as a people to the short-term interests of the market.
I realize this is just the latest stage in a longer process. When I was a kid, we could watch baseball games on broadcast television. Here in New York, the Mets were on WOR channel 9, and the Yankees were on WPIX channel 11. It seemed as if everyone could afford a television set, or at least get to a friend who had one. Cheaper black and white sets could be purchased new for less than sixty bucks, or just ten or fifteen at a thrift store. Almost everyone who lived indoors in New York City also had a TV set.
But over the years, games moved from free broadcast channels to basic cable, and then to “premium tier” cable. If you’re not able to get your team’s cable channel, you can download the MLB app and pay a monthly fee to watch your team’s “out of market” games — meaning you can leave town or live in a different city than your favorite team and watch the games. For about $25/month.
But there’s no consistency. Even armed with a full package of cable and internet, it’s hard to figure out where a game is being shown. On any evening, it may be on broadcast, basic cable, one of several ESPN stations, the team channel, or some version of Fox. The home team announcers may or may not be there to ground audiences in the familiar — a large part of the reason many fans tune in at all.
And now, as various streaming services use their war chests of investment cash to battle for dominance, games are being broadcast on platforms that are too expensive or simply too difficult for many people to access. It started with Facebook live-streaming…
