Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
Nobody.
Bally Sports got bought by Sinclair Media and Sinclair promptly drove it into a MFing mountain.
This was wholly a product of the Fox Sport group getting purchased and parted out. And I don't imagine MLB expected that to happen. The Regional Sports Networks were a perfect solution for baseball - baseball is largely a regional sport. The teams get followed by their local fanbase but it hasn't generated a true 'national' market for probably 50 years. There are just too damn many games played for folks to care about any single game on a Thursday where they don't have a rooting interest.
But the RSNs addressed that perfectly and brought a level of access that was largely unprecedented. What we have now is somehow STILL better than what we had in, say, 1997. But it's certainly a roll-back of 25 years of progress on that front.
It's a mess. But at least as it relates to this specific mess, I'm not positive there was anything else that MLB could've done.
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I've never in my life had a problem accessing Cards games until FSMW got parceled off.
RSN were available on all cable and satellite platforms (before there even was streaming) since I started watching the Cards in 1995 or 96'. Most cable packages it was standard programming back in the day.
What I don't understand is how Bally or Sinclair or whoever owns the rights to the team's games doesn't seem to understand that accessibility is how they make money rather than continually feuding with service providers. And yes MLB seemed to get blindsided by it.
Hopefully in the end MLB takes the nonsense over and you can start getting your teams channels independently.