Following MLB.TV’s Opening Day streaming debacle, the Cleveland Guardians are stepping up to the plate.
In a letter sent to subscribers of the CLEGuardians.TV streaming service on Friday, the team revealed that it will be offering free tickets to apologize for “the inconvenience to your first game viewing experience.”
According to the message, the Guardians are offering affected viewers four free upper reserved tickets to a home game of their choice in April or May, excluding the already sold-out April 8 home opener. Additional details about how subscribers can go about obtaining their complementary tickets will be released next week.
“We recognize despite the excitement for the start of the Guardians 2025 season the debut of CLEGuardians.TV had some technical issues early in yesterday’s game,” the message reads. “There was a temporary outage impacting live game streams from across the league on MLB.TV that was resolved as soon as possible.”
You are forgiven, @MLBTV pic.twitter.com/sp15mIeHOI
— Ohio’s Tate (@BarstoolTate) March 28, 2025
While the Guardians weren’t the only team affected by Thursday’s Opening Day outage, the lackluster streaming experience was especially notable for Cleveland as this marks the first year that MLB is serving as the franchise’s media rightsholder. Throughout the offseason, the team had been pushing CLEGuardians.TV — which costs $99 for the season — as its primary platform before announcing just hours ahead of Thursday’s first pitch that it had reached a deal to distribute games on local television through most cable subscribers.
Although the MLB.TV outage only affected the early portion of Thursday’s game — a 7-4 victory over the Kansas Royals in extra innings — it’s obviously understandable that fans were frustrated by the technical difficulties, especially on Opening Day. Nevertheless, give the Guardians credit for their offer of free tickets, ensuring that there’s at least one game this season that subscribers won’t have to worry about missing a part of due to streaming issues.
