MLB.tv & Blackouts

One of the serious drawbacks of no longer being a cable tv subscriber is that I cannot watch local sports.   For the most part, it is the lack of baseball that gets to me.  It seems like it was only a few years ago that baseball games were broadcast locally.  Those days are definitely gone.  Most of the Red Sox games are now only broadcast on the cable channel NESN.  This means I cannot watch Red Sox games.

Every few weeks, ESPN will carry a Red Sox game and I can watch it online on ESPN3.  Being able to watch these ESPN games online has been a pleasant surprise.  ESPN provides the online viewing experience that I had hoped to get from MLB.tv.

For a cost of about $100 a season, MLB.tv provides online access to live baseball games.  This would work out great if it weren't for the blackouts. 

As a Red Sox fan living in the greater-Boston area, MLB.tv cannot work for me because they blackout all of the Red Sox games.  For that matter, if I was a fan of another American League team and they happened to playing the Red Sox in some far away city, that game would also be blacked out.  I suppose that I could follow a National League team and avoid the blackouts, but unfortunately this is not the viewing experience that I am looking for.

Last year I read a couple of articles that talked about MLB.tv lifting the blackouts, but that did not come to pass.  I still hold out hope that the blackouts are lifted at some point in the near future.  In the event that this does not happen, I would be more than happy to see NESN offer a subscription service that would allow me to to watch the Red Sox games via their website.

Sounds of the Game

This evening (Thursday - October 26th) I am sitting here watching the 2nd game of the 2007 World Series and trying tolerate another Fox broadcast. I cannot help but wonder why anyone at Fox would think it to be a good idea to skip a batter or two so that they can show their "Sounds of the Game" segments.

If Fox didn't cram ads into every free second of the game, they would have time to show segments like this without doing so at the cost of the viewers who are just trying to watch the game. If they are going to keep up with the massive number of ads, they should probably look at losing these extra audio/video "features".

Some one of these years, I wish that the MLB would offer a pay-per-view option for the playoffs where viewers could pay for a broadcast with their hometown announcers calling the playoff games. I would happily pay to hear the NESN folks calling the ALDS, ALCS, and World Series games. And I have to say that I would still order the pay-per-view even if my hometown team (Red Sox) were not playing in the championships.

Major League Baseball Rules Changes

Turns out that there are a few changes to the MLB rules for the 2007 season.

This one struck me a pretty interesting:
"With no runners on, a pitcher will be required to pitch within 12 seconds, the timing starting when the pitcher is in possession of the ball and the batter is in the batter's box, alert to the pitcher."

Amongst other things, it looks like they are try speed up the game a little.