An Unhappy Father's Day
My father-in-law couldn't watch the game on Sunday and there's a lesson in that.
Last weekend my wife and I celebrated Father’s Day with my in-laws on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. My father-in-law is 88 years old and there are few things that he wants at this point in his life. One of those things would be watching his favorite baseball team, the Baltimore Orioles, on a Sunday afternoon while he was waiting for his daughter to fix him dinner for Father’s Day.
But it didn’t happen because my father-in-law only subscribes to a streaming service that includes MASN, the regional sports network (RSN) that is owned by the Orioles, but doesn’t have a subscription to NBC’s Peacock streaming service that was carrying Sunday’s game. Instead, he listened on the radio.
I guess Nassim Taleb would call that an anti-fragile solution.
My father-in-law is a simple man. After high school in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, he served a hitch in the U.S. Navy. When he got out, his did a little of everything. He worked as a cook, ran an inn in Upstate New York and owned a small trucking business. When he first became a fan, there was no such thing as televised baseball. So, as you might imagine, navigating a world where cable and satellite television are giving way to Internet streaming is proving to be a challenge — especially given that he’s living in an area that didn’t have access to broadband Internet until recently.
This is especially aggravating given that in the 21st century we have to tools available to make the life of a sports fan easy and convenient. In a perfect world, it would work like this: if you’re a fan of the local team, you can subscribe to a streaming service that includes the RSN that carries your favorite team, along with ESPN or FS1 to cover the odd game that is carried nationally. If your favorite team is out of market, you subscribe to MLB.TV. You should be able to pay one price to watch all the games. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezey, as ESPN’s John Buccigross might say.
But of course, it isn’t like that at all. Instead, we have a plethora of competing streaming services. In addition to Peacock, Amazon Prime Video also carries games on Fridays now. And even if you subscribe to MLB.TV and live hundreds of miles from your favorite team, there’s still a significant chance that you’re included in that team’s exclusive territory and the game will be blacked out, 20th century style. And that’s also the case if your favorite team is visiting the team that plays in your local area. That means MLB expects you to pony up for the local RSN too, even though you might not be interested in watching that team in any other circumstance.
It would be one thing if this were simply the result of free market competition. Instead, I’ve come to the conclusion that professional sports leagues — with most teams playing in taxpayer-subsidized stadiums and arenas — are weaponizing loyalty in order to bleed every last penny out of their best customers.
Even if you’re on top of the economic food chain and understand how the game is played these days, it can be difficult, if not maddening, to navigate these choices. If you’re an 88-year old man who wants to watch the Orioles and not have to read Sports Business Journal to figure out how to watch the game, you’re overmatched.
Which leads me to one of my favorite writers, a former financier turned chronicler of American life, Chris Arnade. He left Wall Street after the 2007-08 financial crisis, disgusted that the American taxpayer got screwed when the fat cats who love to privatize profits and socialize losses got bailed out.
Arnade started out by visiting poorer neighborhoods around New York City with his camera in tow. Eventually he moved further afield and expanded his travels to the rest of the country. The result was Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.
He learned a lot on his travels. Urban and rural despair look a lot alike. McDonald’s, laughed at in more exclusive neighborhoods, is a lifeline for the rest of America. For the working poor, it offers the last place where they can afford a meal. For the elderly cut off from children forced to flee their hometown in order to survive, it’s a social club. And for school children whose families can’t afford broadband Internet, McDonald’s is the only place they can do their homework.
As a class, these people have been forgotten and they know it. In order to survive, they depend on simple solutions. They used to have pensions, but not anymore. They cling to Social Security and Medicare. They support these programs that they’ve paid into their whole lives because they are simple and easy to understand. And if they’re asked to navigate something that isn’t simple and easy to understand, they can hardly be blamed for feeling like they’re being swindled.
We could have subscribed to Peacock so my father-in-law could see the game, and then cancel the subscription. But he probably wouldn’t have watched the network ever again. And we all know that cancelling a subscription is an ordeal all its own, and that’s how big business wants it to be.
So we balked. If you’re ever faced with the same choice, I hope you would too. It’s the only way they’ll get the message.