Blackout Rules Need Not Apply
| 9
|
by user Xinoph
For too long, we MLB fans have been oppressed.
Not by the inevitably selfish Player's Union or by the owners or by a criminally incompetent Commissioner of Baseball, though those things certainly don't help. No, today, fellow baseball fans, we must rise up to fight those terrible rules, those rules that have for so long made the professional baseball experience inaccessible to so many:
Blackout Rules.
You know the drill. You have a satellite dish, you subscribe to Extra Innings to get every game you can. You watch your team on TV because you live two hours away.
So, this fine summer day, you sit down with some buddies and some beers (or lemonade, in the family-friendly version) and turn on the TV and . . .
Nothing.
You're trying to watch your team. You're trying, even though they haven't had a winning season since the last Presidential Administration. You have the hat, the jersey. Signed baseballs. Photographs. Memorabilia from the last time they won the World Series, before your son - your son who is now in high school, and looking at colleges - was born. He's given up on the team, he thinks the NBA is much cooler, but not you. No, you're dedicated.
Over the years, you've invested hundreds - nay, thousands - of dollars in this team personally, from tickets to signed baseballs to jerseys to sweatshirts, socks, scales, flags, you name it, you've got it. And now, those greedy [EXPLETIVE DELETED]s won't let you watch the [EXPLETIVE DELETED] game!
Screw it, you think, I'm gonna be an NHL fan. That's gotta be easier than this.
Well, OK, maybe not that last part.
Still, it is incredibly frustrating. In college, I was about equidistant from two major league teams, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Baltimore Orioles. Now, I occasionally went to games in not only those two cities, but in Pittsburgh, which was even further away. But believe me when I tell you that if I find out the game's not on TV, I'm not going to pack up and drive 2-3 hours to Camden Yards just because Peter Angelos has a Napoleon complex when it comes to TV rights.
Why must these kind of silly rules be enforced? You're not going to convince someone to go to a stadium that far away just because they can't see it on TV.
Now, it's easy if you live in a town where your team has its own network, or are within an hour of an MLB team and can just pack up and go, but for other fans it's ridiculous. So what do we do to try and circumvent this archaic rule? Well, we buy a satellite. And we get that oh-so-wonderful package, MLB Extra Innings From DirecTV.
Oh yeah it's great, all right. Until you want to watch the game in a city that's five hours away, and sold out. You'd think that would be no problem, right? I mean, what possible . . .
Nope. Blackout Rules Apply.
I mean, it doesn't work this way with the NFL. You get NFL Sunday Ticket, you can pretty much count on being able to watch almost every single game of your personal team, no matter where you are. But baseball? God forbid baseball consider the fan. Never, ever, ever. The used car salesman from Milwaukee is way too busy appointing commissions to clean up his messes. He would never stop to think how many real fans can actually really watch the actual games. No, that would be beneath him.
Besides, I bet he can see any game he wants, and not on DirecTV, either. No, he'll be sitting up there in the box with the owner, making sure things go his way, even if they're not good for the game. He'll be up there, not noticing as things crumble to pieces around him. Commissioner Nero, we'll call him, taking batting practice while baseball burned. And you know why he didn't see it?
Because he made sure that Blackout Rules Did Apply.
Date
Sat 07/29/06, 5:06 pm EST
