Watching Sports in the Modern Age - it’s just so hard being a fan these days
Do you remember being able to turn on the ball game on your TV, on a regular network station, kick back with a beer and root for your favorite team, without trying to juggle with which streaming service it is on, what the password is for the app which isn’t loading, and when it does, it’s glitching so the game isn’t even in real time? Of course not, electricity hadn’t even been invented yet.
I’m a sports fanatic. I love watching and listening to sports on TV and/or the radio, especially baseball, especially the New York Yankees. In my dining room, instead of a fine china cabinet, a $10,000 hand-carved table, with equally ornate chairs, I have two seats from the old Yankee stadium. At the center of my mantle in my living room is a signed baseball by members of the 1988-89 New York Yankees and another one by the great Dave Winfield. My coat rack has a hook designated to my Yankee ball cap.
Watching or listening to sports in the modern age is analogous to being psychologically sodomized by Attila the Hun’s entire army and then after they are done, the cooks, and administrative staff get a run at you. And if you are a sports fan, trying to locate your team on one of the stupid streaming channels is like figuring out how to date Lalisa looking like you do. I rarely watch much TV anymore, unless it’s a sporting event they somehow miraculously forgot to block.
Times have changed, and so has technology. But people haven’t.
Back in the days of big hair and jolt cola, the Yankee game came on network television channel 11, WPIX-TV or WFAN on the radio. Up until 1988 and for 38 years prior, the games broadcasted by WPIX-TV were transmitted from the Empire State building. But then cable television came along. Cha-ching. The irony for me is that the Yankees became the first MLB team whose front office sold their TV rights to cable television allowing MSG network to broadcast 75 games. I was wary of it then, as a 10-year old.
Little did I know back then that the end was coming. From 1991 - 2000, MSG had exclusive rights to 150 games per season. In 1991, if you lived in Manhattan you paid $20.95 per month for cable television. By 2000 it was $60 per month. Today it is like $675.
To watch Yankee games requires some finesse, like being forced to relocate your entire family to some lousy tax-abused suburb run by backwater political shadows with a taste for medieval violence. Otherwise, you’ll more than likely be blacked out.
And if you try to get clever watch or listen to a game through some other venture, like using a relative’s passcode, and those vultures catch you, you will be dragged from your home, tortured, and shipped off to a gulag labor camp on the outskirts of Kingsport, Tennessee, never to be heard from again. I’m not making this up.
It’s hard being a baseball fan in today’s world. Most of us just read the stats in the morning paper. Pretty soon the MLB will block that too.
The dark suits went so far as to block iTunes from allowing fans to listen on the radio because we were only paying $8.99 a month. “That is piracy!” They screamed. I heard them arguing. I was in the waiting area.
Gold fever, baby. Do you think you’re immune? You might think you can withstand the pull, but you’ve never had blocks of sweet, shiny, magical, blood-stained gold stacked at your feet. 90 percent of you would slit your own mother’s throat for a few gold shavings.
It’s always been this way. And the thing about, once something changes, it never goes back to the way it was. It is something we has a species overlooks in the name of “progress.”