Tag: mlb

The Best Beards in Baseball

I remember tweeting “It’s a rebuilding year!” all during the entire 2012 baseball season as Bobby Valentine’s Red Sox racked up one of the worst records ever. It became a running joke for myself and a few of my fellow Red Sox fans, but this past week the memories of that dismal record were all but forgotten as the Red Sox beat the Cardinals in 6 games to become 2013 world champs yet again. I’m not sure what felt better, watching Ortiz rack up an amazing .700+ post-season batting average or the fact that the Yankees never even made it to the playoffs. Okay, both felt pretty good.

Throughout the 2013 season, I really thought the Sox were going all the way. They had a confident new manager in John Farrell, exciting fresh faces like Shane Victorino and Jackie Bradley Jr. and after the bombing at the Boston Marathon, a strong determination to win for the city that loved them so very dearly. They started growing out their beards for luck and that silly bit of camaraderie propelled them forward, racking up win after impressive win. Unlike past years when the Red Sox bullpen collapsed mid-season, this time the strength of the pitching roster only increased. The young mid-relief pitcher Uehara gradually found his way to becoming one of the toughest closers this club’s ever put on the mound.

All these threads led the Sox to the 2013 World Series, a post-season match up that did not disappoint. Game 3 saw an incredible ending due to an obstruction call on 3rd base and game 4 ended with a lightening pickoff from Uehara that even Fox’s cameras missed the first time around. All-in-all the 2013 baseball season brought me, and the rest of Boston’s fans, a great deal of happiness. As a boy I used to think I’d never see the Red Sox ever be crowned world champs. Now it’s happened for an amazing third time in ten years and I honestly still can’t believe it. Thanks to Pedroia, Ortiz, Ellsbury, Lester, Victorino and all the rest of those bearded boys for making 2013 a year to remember. Congrats guys, enjoy the celebration!

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Why Won’t TV Sports Blackouts Just Die Already?

I live in Greensboro, North Carolina which is located approximately 330 miles from Baltimore Maryland, home of the Baltimore Orioles. I’m so far away from Baltimore in fact that I don’t even receive their local television or radio broadcasts. I don’t know the local sportscasters, the best places to eat or even how to get to Camden Yards. Yet, whenever my beloved Red Sox (or any other team for that matter) plays the Orioles, Major League Baseball blacks out the broadcast for me here in Greensboro. Greensboro. North Carolina.

Since they were first televised in the late 60’s and 70’s, sports such as baseball and football have been subject to broadcast blackout restrictions. Originally designed to get people up off the couch, sell tickets and into the home team’s stadiums, blackouts were designed to help ensure a healthy bottom line for both league owners and those with a stake in local television markets. Stadiums cost millions of dollars to build and back in the day blackouts made sense, but not any longer. In today’s age of interconnectivity, smart phones, place-shifted broadcasts and on-demand programming, fans are fed up with the NFL & MLB’s blackouts.

Making matters worse, each league as their own set of rules and restrictions for how blackouts are applied. The NFL’s “75 mile” rule is fairly straight forward. If all tickets of a home game are not sold out, the broadcast is blacked out for a radius of 75 miles from the stadium. Seems reasonable, but given how few games are actually played in a regulation season of football, having even one or two games blacked out is upsetting to die hard fans. In comparison, Major League Baseball’s blackouts are a veritable rat’s nest of regulations that are so convoluted, even team owners don’t understand them. In Las Vegas for example, no less than 6 baseball teams (Dodgers, A’s, Giants, Padres, Angels, and Diamondbacks) are regularly blacked out from television viewing. Sometimes these blackouts aren’t announced until just minutes before the game. If I loved baseball and lived in Las Vegas, I’d probably have a major heart attack about once a week. Thankfully, hope seems to be on the horizon.

Back in February, the Sports Fans Coalition assembled a petition to the Federal Communication Commission outlining fan’s anger at the NFL’s blackout restrictions. Five Democratic Senators joined the petition and urged the FCC to eliminate the rule arguing that taxpayers have helped pay for stadiums and should not have their home games blacked out. They also added it was “a regulatory backstop to an obnoxious and outdated league policy … At a time of persistently high unemployment, sluggish economic growth, and consumer uncertainty, the sports blackout rule supports blatantly anti-fan, anti-consumer behavior by professional sports leagues.” Well said.

This perspective is especially true today since the bulk of sports revenue now comes not from tickets, but from internet and television. Given this reality, it’s difficult to justify withholding broadcasts from fans willing to pay for it. The petition is now a matter of record and a final decision regarding NFL blackouts is expected soon. One hopeful byproduct of the petition is that the F.C.C. may require Major League Baseball to finally document and explain it’s own complex rules for applying blackout restrictions, something fans and owners have asked for repeatedly. Forcing MLB just to explain the rules may push blackouts over the tipping point and finally put an end to them.

In an age when we can watch our favorite movies and television shows whenever we want, wherever we want (mostly), sports blackouts are a slap in the face of the consumer. Fans have put up with these Orwellian restrictions for years but the increasing popularity of smart phones and tablet computers like the iPad have begun to put enormous pressure on leagues, team owners and even government. Social networking and digital connectivity have made this country, indeed this planet, a very small place where all forms of information can be accessed from anywhere. If the petition filed in February simply forces MLB to explain why I can watch the Red Sox kick the tar out of the Yankees but not the Orioles, I’ll be happy. Personally, I’m hoping the F.C.C. takes the TV blackout rule out back for a trip to the proverbial woodshed. One can dream.

Update: In yet another blow to baseball loving fans everywhere, the U.S. 4th District Court of appeals upheld a ruling preventing Time Warner Cable from offering the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN) and its sister station, MASN2, from being added to its cable package in North Carolina. The reasoning the government decided to hang fans out to dry? The Orioles and Nationals have been “so bad” in recent years that no one would want to watch their games anyway. Yeah, never mind that occasionally those teams play OTHER teams like the Yankees or Red Sox, or that as I write this the Orioles are sitting in first place in the AL East. MLB Needs a serious kick in the ass.