Malinowski: Baseball strikes out with its streaming policies
From SABR member Erik Malinowski at Rolling Stone on June 5, 2015, with mention of SABR member Michael Bates:
For Mike Bates, a move from Madison, Wisconsin, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last October was only supposed to help facilitate a reasonable commute to his new day job at the University of Iowa. His off-hours gig, as an editor and contributor to SBNation’s MLB Daily Dish baseball blog, shouldn’t really have been all that negatively impacted.
But when winter turned to Spring Training and then Opening Day, Bates had to come to grips with a new reality: he was now living in what amounted to a baseball dead zone. As a Minnesota Twins fan in Wisconsin, the only team blacked out to him on his computer or mobile device was the Milwaukee Brewers. Makes sense, no big deal. But thanks to MLB’s arcane system that allows teams to decide which markets fall under their “home television territory” and are therefore prohibited from streaming MLB.TV games, the results often look like the goofy after-effects of political gerrymandering run amok. But the big losers, always, are Iowans.
Read the full article here: http://www.rollingstone.com/sports/features/wtf-mlb-baseball-strikes-out-with-its-streaming-policies-20150605
Originally published: June 5, 2015. Last Updated: June 5, 2015.