MLB Regular Season 22: The Thread

[BBTV]

I watch Apple TV+ all the time, but there’s still plenty of people who don’t/won’t use streaming services, (either they’re older, or can’t afford high-speed internet connection) and given the general inconvenience and problems flipping channels, if it’s not my team, I’m simply not going to watch - and I’m sure I’m far from alone. 

 

 

[Sport]

14 minutes ago, BBTV said:

I watch Apple TV+ all the time, but there’s still plenty of people who don’t/won’t use streaming services, (either they’re older, or can’t afford high-speed internet connection) and given the general inconvenience and problems flipping channels, if it’s not my team, I’m simply not going to watch - and I’m sure I’m far from alone. 

 

 

Sort of related - three times during the weekend I was watching TV and a box popped up in the corner of my AppleTV saying "Aaron Judge goes for 61 home runs. Press this button to tune in" or something like that. Normally I hate that because it's always like "CLOSE GAME! Minnesota Twolves down 5 at Sacramento Kings". I don't care. But I actually did care this time and all 3 times I pushed the button they told me to it just took me to the Apple TV home screen and not the actual game. If it's not taking me to the game with the push of a button then I'm not going to then try and navigate through the menus to find it. 

[gosioux76]

29 minutes ago, Sport said:

Sort of related - three times during the weekend I was watching TV and a box popped up in the corner of my AppleTV saying "Aaron Judge goes for 61 home runs. Press this button to tune in" or something like that. Normally I hate that because it's always like "CLOSE GAME! Minnesota Twolves down 5 at Sacramento Kings". I don't care. But I actually did care this time and all 3 times I pushed the button they told me to it just took me to the Apple TV home screen and not the actual game. If it's not taking me to the game with the push of a button then I'm not going to then try and navigate through the menus to find it. 

 

But none of these things prevented either of you, or anyone else, from watching it at no cost, right? 

 

I mean, I get it if you live in an area that doesn't have great internet service. That's a real problem. 

[Sport]

30 minutes ago, gosioux76 said:

 

But none of these things prevented either of you, or anyone else, from watching it at no cost, right? 

 

I mean, I get it if you live in an area that doesn't have great internet service. That's a real problem. 

 

No, but I'm complaining about the Apple TV user experience. If you tell me I can hit a button to watch the At-bat that you just alerted me about then that button better take me directly to the game. 

[BBTV]

Yeah.  I have zero interest in a random StL Cardinals game, but if I can just flip to it then flip back to what I'm doing, I'll watch an at-bat.  But tuning into it takes longer than the at-bat lasts, then having to do that repeatedly is not worth it.;

 

And it's not just living in "an area that doesn't have great internet service".  I volunteer with lots of kids who's families get free "educational service" (or something like that) because they can't afford the kind of service that most of us take for granted.  It's basically good enough for remote learning and googling, but I doubt they can play high-bandwidth games or stream in HD.

 

It would be great for those kids - most of whom are from the black and brown community - to see Pujols hit 700 (or major moments like that in general) but while it normally would be available on their subsidized cable package, in this case it was taken away to be shown to a more exclusive audience (with sub-par broadcasters).

 

If baseball wants to grow the game and get on the radar of an underrepresented talent pool, this is the wrong way to do it.

[gosioux76]

6 minutes ago, BBTV said:

Yeah.  I have zero interest in a random StL Cardinals game, but if I can just flip to it then flip back to what I'm doing, I'll watch an at-bat.  But tuning into it takes longer than the at-bat lasts, then having to do that repeatedly is not worth it.;

 

And it's not just living in "an area that doesn't have great internet service".  I volunteer with lots of kids who's families get free "educational service" (or something like that) because they can't afford the kind of service that most of us take for granted.  It's basically good enough for remote learning and googling, but I doubt they can play high-bandwidth games or stream in HD.

 

It would be great for those kids - most of whom are from the black and brown community - to see Pujols hit 700 (or major moments like that in general) but while it normally would be available on their subsidized cable package, in this case it was taken away to be shown to a more exclusive audience (with sub-par broadcasters).

 

If baseball wants to grow the game and get on the radar of an underrepresented talent pool, this is the wrong way to do it.

 

This is a good point, and you're 100% correct when it comes to that small subset of the MLB audience. Can't argue that point. But for a league that's so frequently derided for its rapidly aging fan base, I'd think that partnering with a streamer -- particularly one attached to Apple -- seems like the sort of thing you'd want to do to grow the game. 

 

 

[Digby]

Partnering with a streamer is one thing, but putting it exclusively on the streaming service... I feel like we aren't there yet. Unless maybe it's Netflix or Hulu. Are these Apple TV games on Fridays being simulcast on local affiliates at least, the way the NFL has done? If that's the case, that's less objectionable to me. 

 

And it's kind of unfortunate to the history books that iconic moments are ending up there. Not exactly Phil Rizzuto or Harry Caray or Vin Scully classic calls, here. A famous moment goes down in history with like a C-squad play-by-play guy and weird Apple chyrons. Idk.

[FiddySicks]

41 minutes ago, gosioux76 said:

 

This is a good point, and you're 100% correct when it comes to that small subset of the MLB audience. Can't argue that point. But for a league that's so frequently derided for its rapidly aging fan base, I'd think that partnering with a streamer -- particularly one attached to Apple -- seems like the sort of thing you'd want to do to grow the game. 

 

 

In theory, yes, that would be a good idea. But the overall issue isn’t really them switching to streaming services, it’s the overall lack of access people have to the game to begin with. Playing a random game here and there on Apple TV+ isn’t going to really cut it when there’s more than 150 other games people can’t access on a team’s season due to needing cable. All you do in this sense is make it more difficult for the older fans who don’t use these services to offer a product that most young people simply do not give a about. If baseball really wants to grow, they need to cut out all this gate keeping bull with “blackout” restrictions that are extremely firm yet still very confusing. Let people who don’t subscribe to the right cable network in, like, Iowa Actually watch a Cardinals or Cubs game on a regular basis, or something. Let people in Reno watch the Giants or A’s without forcing them to spend $100 or more a month for a bunch of other useless crap in order to actually get the games. 

[BBTV]

10 minutes ago, Digby said:

 Are these Apple TV games on Fridays being simulcast on local affiliates at least, the way the NFL has done? If that's the case, that's less objectionable to me. 

 

No, they're not.

[BBTV]

I don't think that streaming works well for live sports for which you don't want to be captive.  

 

Something like a wrestling PPV is one thing because the amount of flipping is probably less than in most cases, but for a baseball game or NFL game, I'll be flipping all through that, and simply won't put any effort into accessing the stream even though I have subscriptions to basically every service out there.

 

Now, if it was the only way I could access my team's games - like if I was out of market and needed some package that was only streaming - then I'd deal with it and feel fortunate that I even have that opportunity, because 20 years ago I wouldn't have.  And at the end of the day, watching professional sports isn't a "right".  But I'm not in that situation, so nuts to these one-off games.

 

Imagine if we had the internet like today in 1998 and McGwire's 62nd was only on some still-obscure streaming channel.  That HR chase literally saved baseball after the strike, and IIRC, even regular non-sports TV shows were being cut into to show McGwire and Sosa ABs.  Given the current ratings for the Apple games, would the sport had survived if everyone had been fully invested in the HR chase only for it to come down to an app-exclusive game?

[gosioux76]

42 minutes ago, Digby said:

Partnering with a streamer is one thing, but putting it exclusively on the streaming service... I feel like we aren't there yet. Unless maybe it's Netflix or Hulu. Are these Apple TV games on Fridays being simulcast on local affiliates at least, the way the NFL has done? If that's the case, that's less objectionable to me. 

 

And it's kind of unfortunate to the history books that iconic moments are ending up there. Not exactly Phil Rizzuto or Harry Caray or Vin Scully classic calls, here. A famous moment goes down in history with like a C-squad play-by-play guy and weird Apple chyrons. Idk.

 

MLS is doing just that next year -- the league is moving in its entirety to Apple+.  Sure, it's not one of the proverbial "Big Four," but it's absolutely something that I'd expect to see more of.

 

For one, the idea there will still be such a thing as "local affiliates" isn't a certainty. At the moment, you have your national networks and regional sports networks. (Your local news stations don't have the resources to cover a professional sports team for a full season.)

 

RSNs are apparently barely breaking even, and Sinclair is reportedly in talks to sell the Bally RSNs for a song to the NHL, NBA and MLB collectively (per a NY Post report last week.) That doesn't mean those local affiliates go away, but it's abundantly clear that nobody's figured out the right business model to make it work.

 

You can bet that MLB, NHL and NBA will be watching the MLS/Apple partnership closely in the next year to see how it all shakes out. 

[gosioux76]

2 minutes ago, BBTV said:

I don't think that streaming works well for live sports for which you don't want to be captive.  

 

Something like a wrestling PPV is one thing because the amount of flipping is probably less than in most cases, but for a baseball game or NFL game, I'll be flipping all through that, and simply won't put any effort into accessing the stream even though I have subscriptions to basically every service out there.

 

Now, if it was the only way I could access my team's games - like if I was out of market and needed some package that was only streaming - then I'd deal with it and feel fortunate that I even have that opportunity, because 20 years ago I wouldn't have.  And at the end of the day, watching professional sports isn't a "right".  But I'm not in that situation, so nuts to these one-off games.

 

Imagine if we had the internet like today in 1998 and McGwire's 62nd was only on some still-obscure streaming channel.  That HR chase literally saved baseball after the strike, and IIRC, even regular non-sports TV shows were being cut into to show McGwire and Sosa ABs.  Given the current ratings for the Apple games, would the sport had survived if everyone had been fully invested in the HR chase only for it to come down to an app-exclusive game?

 

I'm coming to this from someone who's used exclusively streaming services for 5 years. So I have this question: What is it you'd be "flipping through?" In my experience, navigating from game to game or sport to sport on streaming is really not much different from how I imagine experiencing it on traditional cable. 

 

I subscribe to MLB.tv so I can watch the Twins. But if I get a push notification telling me that, say, the Dodgers have a no-hitter in the works, I have no issue jumping from one broadcast to the next. Is it that you can't flip quickly from one app to another -- like from Hulu to Apple? 

 

As for the 1998 scenario, the buzz around the McGwire/Sosa race was so strong that consumers would have found the games wherever they were broadcast. And as it was, watching this in 1998 also required a cable subscription, but had the added limitation of requiring you to watch it in front of an actual TV.  That moment was so big, and carried the weight of the entire game, that even if it

had been on a streaming services, people would have absolutely stopped what they were doing, pulled out their phones and watched it wherever they were. 

[BBTV]

2 hours ago, gosioux76 said:

Is it that you can't flip quickly from one app to another -- like from Hulu to Apple? 

 

Yes.  You flip to Apple, then have to select the game again, let it load (which could take 2 seconds, or 20), then maybe it's live action or maybe it's a commercial, and if it's a commercial and you want to go back to whatever you were watching (Hulu or cable) you have to start the Apple process over again once you flip back.  It's not like it's constantly streaming in the background so you can flip back and it's "just on".

 

The "it's just on" nature of cable is why I just can't "cord cut" - that, and it really doesn't save that much money in many situations (but that's a convo for a different thread.)  Even if Hulu Live runs in the background and can just be "flipped back to", having to reload Apple or Prime or whatever is a deal breaker for me.

 

It's that Apple and Prime aren't channels - they're whole separate applications outside of whatever your typical live-viewing platform is.  Stand-alone applications and live TV just don't mix.

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Oh man, changing channels in Hulu Live TV and getting stuck on an ad is just the worst. There are times it won't load the love programming because it has to go through ads first.

 

It's infuriating.

[gosioux76]

42 minutes ago, BBTV said:

 

Yes.  You flip to Apple, then have to select the game again, let it load (which could take 2 seconds, or 20), then maybe it's live action or maybe it's a commercial, and if it's a commercial and you want to go back to whatever you were watching (Hulu or cable) you have to start the Apple process over again once you flip back.  It's not like it's constantly streaming in the background so you can flip back and it's "just on".

 

The "it's just on" nature of cable is why I just can't "cord cut" - that, and it really doesn't save that much money in many situations (but that's a convo for a different thread.)  Even if Hulu Live runs in the background and can just be "flipped back to", having to reload Apple or Prime or whatever is a deal breaker for me.

 

It's that Apple and Prime aren't channels - they're whole separate applications outside of whatever your typical live-viewing platform is.  Stand-alone applications and live TV just don't mix.

This makes sense to me. Thanks for explaining. I’ve become so accustomed to streaming that the whole has taken over as being natural. 
 

I guess, if anything, you can consider my example to suggest that the transition smooths out after awhile.

[TrueYankee26]

Yankees win the AL East, Cardinals win the NL Central

[TrueYankee26]

Judge did it! #61

 

 

[LMU]

The Judge chase has to be one of the most meaningless, overhyped stories in recent memory. He tied a league record in a sport where leagues practically don’t matter anymore, putting himself now tied for seventh all-time and eight back. Setting aside feelings about steroids, this whole thing wouldn’t have raised a single eyebrow if anyone but a Yankee was involved.

[Germanshepherd]

Regardless of my personal Yankee bias or steroid feelings, 61 should still matter cause interleague play is largely bs and baseball was funnier when there was two leagues who weren’t allowed to see each other until the World Series. 
 

I grew up with two weeks of interleague play at the beginning and end of seasons, and that is a nice compromise that I enjoyed, but I am sympathetic to the old school different leagues different rules mentality. 

[DEAD!]

6 hours ago, LMU said:

The Judge chase has to be one of the most meaningless, overhyped stories in recent memory. He tied a league record in a sport where leagues practically don’t matter anymore, putting himself now tied for seventh all-time and eight back. Setting aside feelings about steroids, this whole thing wouldn’t have raised a single eyebrow if anyone but a Yankee was involved.

I happen to agree with this. Yet, as someone who believes 73 is the record (and happen to witness two of those), the number 61, and even 755, still stands out more for me.