Reds’ Trevor Bauer has a radical idea for MLB: remove blackout restrictions on games
As more people continue to pivot away from cable television to streaming services, some issues have arisen.
A big one for baseball fans is not being able to watch their favorite team without having cable or plopping down a chunk of change on an app. MLB-TV is one option, but even that is a problem because of blackout restrictions. For instance, Royals fan in Kansas City can’t watch games on MLB-TV.
That, Cincinnati Reds pitcher Trevor Bauer said, is a mistake on the part of Major League Baseball.
Bauer was on the ESPN Daily podcast and brought up the subject when asked by Jeff Passan what MLB can do if it is the first league back after the sports shutdown because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s a huge opportunity here to have baseball be the only thing that people are watching, but you can’t be the only thing people are watching if people can’t watch your sport,” Bauer said.
“The first thing baseball needs to do is make sure that everybody can watch their product. That’s tricky right now because of the blackouts, paying for MLB-TV, not being able to watch your hometown team, maybe you don’t have the cable provider that you need to have in LA or Canada can’t watch the Blue Jays now or whatever the case. All these deals that have been struck that people can’t watch the product.”
Passan proffered this idea: make all games available for free for the first month.
Bauer believes fans would be willing to watch via an app on their phone, table or smart TV if every single game is viewable.
“You can charge them for the product itself, but just make it accessible,” Bauer said. “There are tons baseball fans that would pay $150 a year, that’s less than $30 a month, to watch baseball, because they would be able to watch their favorite team. But they’re not going to pay $150 a year if they can’t watch their favorite team on the stupid app.”
Lifting blackouts seems like a no-brainer, right?
This will be a sticking point for fans going forward. Adweek predicts nearly 25% of all households will cut the cord by 2022, meaning baseball fans will potentially not have an opportunity to watch their favorite team.
Here is Bauer on the subject of blackouts:
