Tune in fall sports for freeIf
you’ve cut the cable cord to save big bucks like I have, trying to tune in sports is harder than winning a postseason game against the New York Yankees.
But I’ve won that battle, just like my beloved Baby Bombers did against the Cleveland Indians. The hard part is figuring out which channels are carrying playoff games and matching them to the right package offered by a no-contact streaming service. Best of all you can watch with a free trial. If your team gets eliminated, cancel and pay nothing.
After breaking up with Comcast more than two years ago, watching live sports has been a confounding conundrum that has not made for marital harmony. The ugly situation reared its head in January when the New York Giants clinched a playoff birth. My husband, Dan, demanded to know how he was going to watch the game a mere five minutes before kickoff. I quickly signed up for AT&T’s app-based DirecTV Now ($35 a month for 60 channels with a seven-day free trial), so he could watch them lose to the Green Bay Packers. I canceled the service before I was charged.
Now, a new problem has cropped up. Major League Baseball and the National Football League have so many contracts with different networks on top of local blackout restrictions, it’s almost impossible to figure out what channel a game is airing on even if you pay for TV (Division Series games aired on MLBN, ESPN, FS1 and TBS, etc.). But this is especially true for cord cutters who need to take a deep dive into postseason schedules before picking a package since each streaming service offers several tiers and prices.
This month, I assumed we could just subscribe to MLB.TV’s postseason package like we did last year, since we paid $120 to watch regular season games. Stupid me. On the day of the Wild Card Game on Oct. 3, I discovered MLB.TV only offers postseason games for $24.99 if “eligible subscribers in the U.S. authenticate through their supported Pay TV provider.” Well, we don’t have a supported Pay TV provider because we cut the F@%&!*$ cord. Authenticate this, MLB.TV!
Not only does MLB.TV clearly not value my annual business, it nearly ended my marriage when it did not allow us to buy a postseason package.