Are you a Major League Baseball fan who hates all the different streaming services it takes to watch games? Rob Manfred actually agrees with you.
There was a time where baseball fans knew what channel their favorite team was airing locally, and knew to check ESPN or Fox if they were airing nationally. Then FS1, MLB Network and TBS entered the rotation. And in recent years, baseball fans who want to watch every game have had to add streaming services Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Peacock and Roku to the mix. Yankees fans, for example, saw their games air on eight different networks or services throughout the 2024 MLB season.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred joined Chris Russo on his SiriusXM Radio show, Mad Dog Unleashed Wednesday afternoon before Game 5 of the World Series and admitted he doesn’t love the idea of fans having to juggle so many streaming services.
“The Apple deal, to the extent that we have experimented with new partners like Apple, it’s part of our effort to get to a media model where we service our fans better,” Manfred claimed. “During that period of experimentation there has been some fragmentation that I don’t love. But we’re not doing it just for the sake of making a buck. We’re doing it in order to figure out what broadcasters, if you’ll let me use that term, are best suited to deliver our games to our fans at an appropriate price and without a lot of confusion as to where you find them.”
Russo followed up by asking Manfred if he understands why MLB fans complain about having to wrestle with so many different networks and streaming services to watch their favorite teams throughout the season.
“100%, I understand,” Manfred admitted. “Because I’m a sports fan, I’m like every other sports fan. I don’t like to have to look 10 places or pay for 10 places to watch the games that I want to watch. I think the point is, when you have a lot of change, you need to do some things to put yourself in a position to make good decisions to deliver to your fans a better model where they know where they can find their games and they don’t have to be searching around and paying multiple services in order to see them.”
From that standpoint, Manfred and Major League Baseball are failing. While we love Manfred’s candor in admitting he understands why fans hate MLB’s various streaming partners, his attempt at claiming this is all about serving the fans is laughable. The Yankees aren’t on eight different networks and streaming services in a season because MLB is still trying to figure out the best way of serving its fans. They’re on eight different networks and streaming services because like every league, MLB is always trying to make one more dollar.
But the next time you struggle to find where you can watch your favorite team while wrestling with the idea of giving your credit card number to another streaming service, just know Manfred is in his living room similarly fumbling the remote and yelling at the TV because his Yankees are on Amazon Prime one night and Apple TV+ the next. The difference, however, is Manfred can do something to fix it, you can’t.
[SiriusXM]