Cartoon Baseball

Fewer and fewer away baseball games are shown on local television. Does baseball really benefit by this?

The migration from broadcast TV to cable has become a stampede in the MLB and the NBA. In the past, the home games were on a premium cable channel and the away games were on over the air. I cannot believe that baseball has picked up viewership by moving almost all the games to cable, and certainly the local channels who have replaced games with infomercials cannot be picking up viewers either. How does the sport benefit from this regrettable trend?

Public Comments

1. Although I agree with you, television contracts is where the money is at. WGN was the sole broadcast channel of Cubs games. Now I have to flip around to four different stations looking for the game. How annoying.
2. I believed it today most people have satellite or cable TV and onliest you are a hillbilly and still have rabbit ears to watch TV. Most people are like me i never watch nothing on locale TV because there nothing on them no more onliest you like talk show. Its all about the money and rating leaving the poor people out of watching there favor teams.
3. The Angels, for example have moved more and more games over the last 5 years to Fox Sports West (cable) and has left a smaller share to the local TV. Bottom line is money. The sports cable channel is able to buy bigger blocks of games for transmission making the team more money. In '02 you could only catch half the home games on local TV and almost no road games. Now every game is able to be piped in through cable/satellite. In other words, the ESPNs and FSNs are able to purchace bigger blocks of games than the local TV stations can making the team more