Blue Jays could clinch playoff berth on Apple instead of Sportsnet

We’re getting down to Magic Numbers season for MLB, the most exciting time of year to be a baseball fan.

And after following your favorite team through 150+ games, you’ve become accustomed to hearing one set of voices on your local broadcast. It’d be a shame if the most important game of the year happened to air somewhere else.

Unfortunately for Toronto Blue Jays fans, this exact scenario might happen. The Blue Jays are two games away from clinching a playoff berth, and have an exclusive game looming with Apple TV+ on Friday that the streamer “quietly added last week,” according to the Toronto Sun. If the Blue Jays split the next two games with the Tampa Bay Rays, Friday’s game against the Kansas City Royals could very well send them to the playoffs.

In the grand scheme of things, this issue is small potatoes. But for the Blue Jays, it matters just a bit more than your run-of-the-mill MLB club. Sportsnet, the Canadian television network which owns local broadcast rights for the Blue Jays, airs games from coast-to-coast in the country, not just in the Toronto market. Audiences for recent games have well eclipsed the seven-figure threshold, averaging 1.4 million viewers last weekend for a series sweep of the Baltimore Orioles.

Unless those fans have an Apple TV+ subscription, they’ll be unable to watch Friday’s game.

It’s a reality that baseball fans will unfortunately have to live with for the foreseeable future, as streamers continue to gobble up exclusive game inventory. It doesn’t matter much for a random July contest, but come September, fans rightfully express frustration that some of their favorite teams’ most important games are being cast off to broadcast crews without the same breadth of knowledge their local crews possess.