For baseball fans: Shohei Ohtani just played the greatest game in baseball history

[Oeditpus Rex]

5. Same here, and it pisses me the fuck off

We've had MLB-TV for years and get to watch about 150 Dodgers games (or any others) for free. We don't get to watch the Great Rivalry games against the Giants because we're in the Bay Area cable market, so they're blacked out for non-cable subscribers.

As for the postseason, we got to watch two of the Wild Card games with Cincinnati because they were on the Fox broadcast channel. The rest of the NL postseason games were long ago sold to TBS. (They alternate every year. The 2026 NL postseasonn will be on regular Fox, which is broadcast, or Fox Sports 1, which requires cable.)

I grew up listening to baseball on radio, except forvthe nine Giants-Dodgers games at Doder Stadium. KTVU, then one of the best independent stations in tge country, broadcast them, while their "sister" station KTTV in Lis Angeles did the same for the nine games played at Candlestick Park. Then I got spoiled by (mostly) NBC-TV, broadcasting all postseason games over the air.

Then along came Big Cable to buy up all the broadcast rights and force us to pay about $130 per year or more to watch our club's games.

You'd think the cable monolith would offer just their baseball channel for like $10 per month instead of bundling it in with 150 channels, many of them for online shopping or cooking. Or that MLB-TV wouldn't have ended their postseason package for like $30 instead of selling out to Big Cable. Well, that's predatory capitalism for you.

(I know this post is kinda long. Obviously, I'm quite angrily passionate about this.)