Baseball Journal 6-23-13 Opinion-National and Regional Broadcasts

I’ve heard Bud Selig trumpet the regional ratings of Major League Baseball teams, and then lament MLB’s drop off in playoff ratings. I’ve heard snarky sports talk hosts refer to baseball as a regional sport. Then I heard one host mention that the MLB was actively discouraging national broadcasts of Cubs and White Sox games on WGN. This started me thinking.

I can remember a time when the Braves, Mets, Dodgers, and Giants were on national cable on a daily basis. (And local broadcasts of the Padres and the Rockies at different times in my area.) I’ve heard that the Braves were only on TBS to begin with because Ted Turner wanted to be able to see his team while he was anywhere in the country. When the network changed ownership, I heard that they dropped the Braves, to focus on scripted television (though they broadcast the NBA and most of the baseball playoffs still).

What the MLB seems to want is all of the teams to just be broadcast on their own regional networks daily. They only want national games to be spotlight games on their own network (sometimes their own production, sometimes they pick up a team’s feed), Fox, and ESPN. Why would they not want more daily national coverage like on WGN? It’s the only way you’re going to create nationally popular teams. Otherwise, the league will be fragmented into only regionally popular teams, except for the Yankees, Red Sox, Cubs, and Dodgers. This will of course impact playoff ratings, unless those particular teams are playing. Little wonder they expanded the playoffs. They have to ensure a better chance of those teams making it. MLB will never push for NFL-like parity, as that might disrupt the ability of the nationally popular Yankees or Dodgers to overspend to on their teams.

So what’s the plan? As near as I can figure, MLB wants to keep daily baseball broadcasts regional so that they can sell website and satellite packages for people wanting daily, out of market games. National broadcasts will essentially only showcase the more popular teams, which have the best possibility of getting ratings. Is this a good plan? It’s not bad in the short-term at least.

However it is perpetuating the popularity of a handful of teams at the expense of the rest and this may be permanent. Let’s say the Kansas City Royals gain an owner who wants to win, money no object. Even if they match payroll with the Yankees (which is unlikely to be a good business move) and start winning, the Royals still would not have the Yankees’ popularity and Kansas City is not the media market that New York is. The NFL doesn’t have these considerations. Green Bay competes with New York equally.

I worry more about growing the fan base. Driving fans to subscription services seems to smack of soaking existing fans more than getting new fans. They did the same thing in the 90’s. For a couple of years, you could get team radio broadcasts by stations that streamed over the Internet for free. MLB shut that down and put all that on their website, available by subscription. Good business, but I don’t know if they made any new fans that way.

Like I said in the beginning, there used to be several nationally broadcast teams that were available daily. Now, it’s WGN, MLB network, and your regional team. WGN is on everyone’s cable, but it’s only one station shared by two teams and not every day. MLB is a three digit station where I am and part of an enhanced package and they don’t show games constantly either. I hope you like your regional team (mine is the Diamondbacks, who I do like), because that’s your main daily option.

I latched on to the Dodgers, Giants, Cubs, and Braves largely because of their national broadcasts. (The Braves national exposure gained baseball a legion of Chipper Jones loving female fans.) I could flip on the TV (back when I had access to cable) and always find one of them if I wanted a game. You could be a casual fan pretty easily. Now I keep a schedule of the teams I like and keep track of when they’re on. Not something a casual fan would do.

It seems to me that baseball should want to make their product as ubiquitous as possible, regardless of the teams. Hey, can you find a football game on Saturdays and Sundays in the fall? That kind of easy access. Baseball is a daily soap opera, not a weekly event. You want people to run into games on frequent basis and hopefully get involved with them and want to watch more. A lot of places in the country aren’t blessed with good teams, and under the current system it may be hard for them to get better. Having a bunch of teams, available nationally on a daily basis, would seem to increase the possibility of a casual fan to find one they might like to follow.

This advocacy for more games is fairly self-serving on my part. I want more games to choose from without having to pay extra for them. Given the dearth of original programming during the summer and the sheer volume of ball games being played, I think it’s in baseball’s best interests to increase the amount of national daily broadcasting. It would serve them better in the long-term to grow the fanbase, even at the expense of possible short-term profits gained by restricting access.