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For the past six months, transplanted baseball fans around the country have held out hope that the league's owners would get together and address the ridiculous blackout policy that seriously affects MLB.tv and MLB Extra Innings subscribers across the country. They said they'd talk about it in November and didn't. Then it was supposed to be addressed before the season and again, it wasn't. Now, Maury Brown says the problem is unlikely to be fixed any time in the future, mostly because teams are afraid of shrinking the size of their TV markets in the current economy.
If you're someone who lives in the same market as your favorite team, you're probably unaware of just how MLB's blackout policy affects fans. In effect, the entire map of the United States is divvied up with baseball teams claiming TV markets as their home markets. When you buy an MLB package, either online or from your cable or satellite provider, the games of your "home" teams are blacked out.
This isn't a problem in, say, Pittsburgh, where only the Pirates are blacked out. If you happen to be a Los Angeles Dodgers fan living in Pittburgh, you can buy Extra Innings and watch the Dodgers in any game that they're not playing the Pirates, then when they do play the Pirates you can watch the local broadcast.
Where this really gets hairy is in markets without teams, like where I currently live (the Raleigh/Durham market in North Carolina). Here, the Orioles and Nationals are both blacked out, even though the the channels that carry their games aren't available locally. If you're an O's or Nats fan here, you're out of luck. You can't watch your favorite team. Even if you're, say, a Mets fan, you miss in the neighborhood of 20 Mets games a year, because you can't watch them when they play a divisional opponent. That's despite paying between $160 and $200 for the rights to watch "every" game.
Things are even worse in Vegas, which is claimed by six teams (both LA squads, the Giants, Diamondbacks, A's, and Padres), with only three of those clubs (both LA squads and the Padres) broadcasting locally. If you're an A's fan in Vegas, you only get to see them play the Angels.
It's an arcane and illogical policy that does far more harm to baseball than good, but the owners don't really seem to care. And they wonder why TV ratings are dropping.
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