The days of turning on your television and finding your favorite Major League Baseball team on the same station for almost every game are over, especially if you root for the New York Yankees.
Of course, Yankees fans have known this for a few years now, and have been apt to complain about it any chance they get. Things reached a fever pitch during Aaron Judge’s quest to break the American League home run record when certain Yankees games were exclusively broadcast on Apple TV. The outcry eventually included stern rebukes from politicians despite the fact that it was free for anyone to watch the games.
If anyone thought that Yankees fans, and to a larger extent baseball fans, might be ready to accept the new normal of needing several subscriptions and packages in order to watch every regular-season game, a viral tweet on Monday surely disabused them of that notion.
You have to subscribe to four different services to watch the next five Yankees games.
SUN – Peacock
MON – off-day
TUES – YES
WEDS – Amazon Prime Video
THURS – YES
FRI – Apple TV+— River Ave. Blues (@RiverAveBlues) May 21, 2023
“You have to subscribe to four different services to watch the next five Yankees games,” read a tweet from River Ave. Blues, which then noted that you would need access to Peacock, YES Network, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV+ in order to watch every Bronx Bombers contest this week.
One caveat is that out-of-market viewers could sign up for MLB TV and that includes Prime Video games, but that doesn’t exactly make for that many less hoops to jump through.
It’s one thing to deal with knowing one game in a week will require a subscription or a phone call with your parents to help them figure out how to sign up for a streamer, but it’s something else altogether when you have weeks like this, and New York media folks were fired up about it.
“It’s not that I feel bad for the Yankees fans, but I do feel kind of like their frustration,” Boomer Esiason said on his WFAN show Monday. “You’ve got to find them on Peacock. You’ve got to find them on Apple TV+. You’ve got to find them on Prime. And then you’ve got to find them on YES. When are they, where are they, and how do we find them? It’s ridiculous. This is as bad as the NFL. You talk about a money grab.”
Meanwhile, the River Ave. Blues garnered some strong reactions all its own, and not just from Yankees fans.
Sports that aren’t on streaming are going to grow in popularity. Streaming is lousy for fans and this kind of stuff requires too much effort. Some portion will look for something else. https://t.co/aGFPSgYg7B
— Dan Wetzel (@DanWetzel) May 22, 2023
The harder we make it to find sports the more the next generation of potential fans will punish us. https://t.co/N27aYZ5lVr
— Michael Mulvihill (@mulvihill79) May 22, 2023
https://twitter.com/barry/status/1660723711119335434
This stuff is starting to stink. Watching sports is feeling more inaccessible these days https://t.co/oWgrV3fkJL
— marisa ingemi ✨ (@Marisa_Ingemi) May 22, 2023
I’m feeling so vindicated. https://t.co/XdYYSi88Rj
— Jimmy Traina (@JimmyTraina) May 22, 2023
This is exactly how you DONT grow the game. https://t.co/76HukZQhDE
— John Bollman (@JohnBollman11) May 22, 2023
It’s worth noting that the number of streaming games that most MLB teams play in a given season are still extremely low, though that’s small comfort to Yankees fans frustrated by the current situation.
[River Ave. Blues, Barrett Sports Media]
