Television Taking Fans Away From Baseball

If you are a New York Yankees fan (well, there's no accounting for taste) living in Washington, no longer will you be able to get your pinstriped cable television fix on a nightly basis this season if a proposed deal between Major League Baseball and the DirecTV satellite service is consummated in the next few weeks.

Similarly, if you are a Washington Nationals fan living in the Bronx (all seven of them, maybe), you're out of luck, too. In fact, thousands of baseball fans across the country who root, root, root for their favorite teams via television while living in areas far, far away from those markets are not going to be able to have a chance to purchase the old Extra Innings cable package available on cable since 2002.

That 10-channel service, costing $179 last year, provided an additional 60 baseball games a week to more than 230,000 cable and Dish Network subscribers last year, with another 270,000 getting it for the same price on DirecTV. In the next few weeks, baseball and DirecTV are expected to announce a new deal that will take that package exclusively to one satellite television company, a seven-year, $700 million contract that also will include the start-up of a new baseball channel that most likely will begin in 2009, also only on DirecTV.

The sports world blogosphere is atwitter about the pending agreement, and so, apparently, are some members of Congress. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) sent a letter this past Friday to Federal Communications Commissioner Chairman Kevin Martin asking him to look into the proposed deal, which still hasn't been made public by either party.

"We're a little ahead on this issue right now," Kerry spokesman Vince Morris said on Monday. "But before it does become a done deal, we'd like some answers on how it would be regulated or even if it could be stopped or amended to satisfy more baseball fans."

"Here's what bothers me," Kerry, a member of the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees telecommunications, told the New York Times last week. "You get Major League Baseball and DirecTV marshaling their forces to go out and make money while cutting out fans. In my judgment, more fans watching games strengthens baseball...There's a whole movement toward fans being screwed by consolidation which raises prices and reduces options."

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), past chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also told the Times he's asked his staff to see if the proposed new deal would constitute an antitrust violation, even if baseball still clings to a long-time anti-trust exemption handed down years ago by the Supreme Court.

But forget the legal implications for a moment. What baseball apparently is about to do just seems plain dumb to a lot of people, who point out that the league probably will be leaving millions of dollars on the table by making an exclusive deal with DirecTV instead of hammering out agreements with cable and satellite services that might have been worth $140 to $150 million a year, instead of the $100 million from just one source.

And, oh yes, why would you alienate such a substantial fan base so devoted to the game they're more than willing, in fact, now begging, to pay a premium price to watch the games?

Rich Levin, a spokesman for Major League Baseball, said the league would not comment because the deal has not been finalized.

Baseball actually did try to work a deal with a consortium of cable networks, hoping to use the Extra Innings package to get a baseball network launched on the basic tier of cable services. The consortium balked, telling baseball it preferred to sell a baseball network as a premium station on the sports tier, where only those who wanted the service would have to pay for it.

When that bargaining strategy failed, Major League Baseball went directly to DirecTV, which now covers about 16 million television homes around the country, compared to more than 75 million cable homes that had access to the Extra Innings package last year.