I have finally reached the age when I can do nothing but complain about the game that I love.
I love baseball. I’ve loved it since the first time a ball found my palm, long before I learned how to screw the cable box into the back of the TV that went from 1 to 36. (1 was always Weather, 36 was always MTV). I loved it before I knew what those grainy pictures on the TV were, before I understood that the box score could be a map to a treasure I’d never quite reach. The pictures of Al Cowens, and George Brett, Freddie Patek, and John Mayberry were my first heroes, and they still are, even if now they arrive as static-laden legends who scream at us through a streaming bundle.
We used to watch a whole summer in the glory of the NBC Game of the Week, when a kid could stay up late to see a doubleheader and not worry about a sudden “we’ll be right back after this word from our sponsor” that lasts longer than the game. Channel 4 or 41—Denny Trease behind the microphone, that soft Kansas hum wrapping the afternoon like a warm blanket. And yes, you could always catch Denny Matthews on the radio, sending the game through a speaker that looked like a dented summer coin slot.
Then baseball did something I’ll never forgive it for. It started carving itself into networks and packages, a mosaic of “watch this game on Fox Sports Midwest… or Fox Sports something else… or the Royals TV Network… and then, when the magic of the Internet fell upon us, like a bad magician, it pulled blackouts out of a top hat and forgot to tell us where the rabbit went. It wasn’t just football that learned to fragment; baseball learned to fragment into a dozen different streams, each one with a slightly different name and a slightly different password you’ll probably forget while you’re muttering about the universal law of dead batteries and cruel, unhelpful scrolls.
Today, MLB makes it nearly impossible to watch Kauffman Stadium without a ticket, as you have to pay $200 to watch online—the RoyalsTV package. And that’s assuming the Royals aren’t on Netflix, or NBC, or Fox, or ESPN, or AppleTV, or the Cooking Channel, or projected onto the side of a bus. It’s hard for me to find the game. It’s nearly impossible for my 80-year-old parents to have passwords to all of these services, let alone pay $80 a month for all this crap when all they want to do is turn on “the game.”
Now, which password was it again? Was the Apple TV password the one with the 0%**@ in it, or was it @%$$#?? I forget. Let’s just say the troubleshooting calls are LONG.
All we want to do at the end of a long hard day is watch Bobby Witt Jr. hit doubles and Salvador Perez chase sliders in the dirt, and watch Cole Ragans strike out Aaron Judge before the Royals lose in the 9th because we don’t have a reliable closer. Is that so hard, MLB? These blackout rules, in addition to all of these streaming subscriptions, make it nearly impossible to follow the club. And, not sure if you’ve followed ticket and parking prices, but it sure isn’t affordable to head to a game more than once in a while.
So here we are, clinging to the crackle of a crystal-clear memory and poking holes in the digital quilt we’ve sewn over summer. If there’s a way to make this simpler, I’m not asking for a miracle; I’m asking for a single login, a single price, a single inning where I don’t have to negotiate with a small squad of streaming goblins just to see a baby step forward in the seventh. Until then, I’ll keep loving the game, even as it plays hide-and-seek with my Sunday. I’m asking for MLB to help its fans watch its product.
At least we still have Denny on the radio. For now…
