I just wanted to rant about the state of MLB for the moment. Selling out local broadcasting rights to cable networks and blocking local viewership was one of the most short sighted stupid ass decisions ever that has prohibited growth for the last twenty years.
The league grew the most when local games were free to watch over the air. Blocking local games behind paywalls as more and more people cut cable and move to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon. It is one of the stupidest decisions ever. Online solutions don't work in some cases due to blackouts.
Obviously the move isn't working out in some cases for cable networks because whenever I watch local regular season games whether it's the Rangers or Astros you see the same 3-5 advertiser commercials every commercial break so I don't even know how they make money off of it. It would make more sense money wise if the games were broadcasted for free with higher viewership that way you can make more money off advertising.
Yea the MLB will get decent ratings during the playoffs but that's because it's pretty much free except for TBS coverage depending on if they're covering NL or AL. In fact, whenever TBS does provide online streaming coverage for free it often crashes due to high demand.
MLB keeps complaining about their growth and saying they need to "modernize the game". Without ever addressing that it might be that most people just don't have the means to watch the games. So stop with this cable shit and put local games back on local networks that can broadcast for free.