A TV Fight That's Tough to Watch

The plight of Nationals fans who want to watch their team on TV has worked its way up baseball's brain stem until it has finally reached the consciousness of the person whom the late Red Smith used to refer to as the sport's "supreme being."

So, we should probably give it a week or two before we start passing out pitchforks and torches to the villagers.

But we shouldn't wait long. The Nats and their fans deserve better than to be pawns in a TV turf war between quasi-monopolist Comcast and Peter Angelos's new Mid-Atlantic Sports Network that hopes to unseat Comcast as the regional TV big dog. Both Comcast and MASN want you to be mad, very mad, that you can't see enough Nats games -- as long as you are mad at the other side. In fact, you should be mad at both of them. Either could solve the problem. Neither wants to. As usual, the rich guys are fighting in court, and in the court of public opinion, over the spoils. And the spoils are us.

According to sources in baseball, heads may get banged in the merry month of May and our TV gloom may lighten. We'll see. Given the sport's track record, probably not enough heads. And probably not hard enough. But anything would be a start.

The new factor in the equation is that baseball in general and Commissioner Bud Selig in particular are now aware that the Washington market, to which the game arrived so late, is turning out to be quite the little gold mine. And nobody at the top of the game wants to see his money-maker and Congress-pleaser spoiled by an endless legal struggle. Comcast has already sued MASN. Of course, MASN is preparing its countersuit.

In a battle between the Orioles owner and Big Cable, it's hard to pick a side. If the fight were held in a vacant coliseum where no innocent bystanders could be hurt, you could root for the whole structure to fall on them both. But that's not the case. The innocent bystanders in this battle of titans are the Nats and their fans. And they are being damaged with every passing day that the majority of the Washington games are not available on TV to a majority of the region's viewers.

What baseball is beginning to sense, but must soon grasp completely, is that the facts on the ground here are intolerable. And they can't be allowed to stand for long. If they do, the sport will find that real damage may soon be done to the Nationals and, eventually, mischief will surely arise in the D.C. Council, where anti-ballpark sentiment simmers.

Right now, only about half of the Nationals' potential fan base can watch roughly half of the team's games. About a million of us can see almost every game. About a million of us can see almost zero. The rest of us can see about half the games on over-the-air Fox affiliates that sometimes have poor reception. In other words, while a minority is happy, the large majority of Nationals fans are mildly dissatisfied, miserable or furious. For the nation's capital, a city that has waited 34 years for a team and has already surpassed virtually every expectation in attendance, this second-class treatment, especially when compared with the Orioles' saturation TV coverage of every household, verges on the obscene.

Those Nats fans who get DirecTV can watch almost every Washington game. But DirecTV reaches less than 20 percent of the whole Washington market. It's a drop in the bucket. Balanced against those lucky few are a roughly equal number of unfortunate stooges, nearly a million of us, who live a short-to-reasonable drive from RFK Stadium but aren't in the properly anointed Maryland county and thus get almost no Nats games whatsoever. Unless, of course, we switch from Comcast to DirecTV or stand in a treetop with UHF rabbit ears on our heads to hope for a faint Channel 20 signal.

The level of suffering for Nats fans, or potential fans, varies. Plenty of viewers, even core District neighborhoods, have shoddy over-the-air Nats reception. What is this, 1959? However, all in all, the problem is simple and huge. While all of us are bombarded by every Orioles game, less than 20 percent of us have comparable access to the Nats. And many have nothing.

Luckily, baseball's recent obsession with its steroid scandal has subsided (slightly) and Washington can now get an iota of executive attention. For example, baseball president Bob DuPuy noticed that, last Saturday, the Nationals drew more than 40,000 to a night game in a steady drizzle while the Orioles drew less than 20,000 in the afternoon of the same day when it was dry at Camden Yards. To the sport's old hands, things like this mean a lot. They start to wonder, what is Washington's true potential?

What if nearly 6 million people actually had a reasonable chance to see Livan Hernandez pitch or Brad Wilkerson hit? What if fans actually had a chance to distinguish the closed batting stance of Vinny Castilla from the classic switch-hitting style of Jose Vidro? What if somebody, anybody, actually tried to market the Nationals with an advertising budget remotely similar to any other major league city of comparable size?