MLB has too many revenue ‘streams’
IF YOU’RE scoring at home, it’s Bud Selig ,to Rob Manfred ,to MLB team owners — at least in the short term.
This week, including tonight, four of this week’s Yankees games will have been seen exclusively on four different pay networks: Peacock, YES, Amazon Prime and Apple.
The one thing baseball can’t logically condition more folks to do — learn to live without baseball in the nation’s largest TV markets — is what MLB has chosen to do in exchange for rightnow dough. MLB might as well be in the reverse mortgage business.
And it was Selig who years ago measured the success of MLB only “in terms of revenue.”
Then there’s Roger “It’s All About Our Fans” Goodell who, at the same time he has negotiated as extension of his $64 million per contract and sold the exclusive rights to a playoff game to a pay TV streaming service, has approved NFL “Thursday Night Football” bait-and-switch teamflexing for pay TV money, making fools of hundreds of thousands of customers — “fans” — who bought tickets to Sunday afternoon late-season games suddenly switched to Thursday nights.
Not that Goodell has been shamed, let alone condemned, from the compliant, obedient sports media.
Good investment PSLs, anyone?
➤ Tough watching this year’s PGA Championship as too many players seemed like a Saudi desert mirage, dollar signs swinging sticks.
PGA club pro Michael Block provided some relief. Paired Sunday with gentlemanly Justin Rose, Block, the most grateful man in the field, was in the steady company of one of golf’s most gracious men.
And, as usual, CBS presented a ton of “live shots” that obviously were shown on tape — unless CBS still has the clairvoyance to cut to a guy 12 back just before he holes out from the sand. TV doesn’t yet know that we know better?
➤ Mike Tirico, hosting the Preakness, violated NBC’s Code of Deception when at 6:30 he spoke a forbidden truth: the race is scheduled “for a half-hour from now.”
➤ I’m consistently mystified by decisions made by the Brian Cashman-Aaron Boone team. Just as Aaron Hicks broke out from his two-season batting miseries — and in no small way — the Yanks released him. Much the way Boone pulls 1, 2, 3 relief pitchers.