I’m tired of digging in my pocket to watch baseball (Opinion)

I have reached the pinnacle of frustration with Major League Baseball and specifically the New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies, and New York Mets for allowing and voting to add several additional outlets to televise and stream your favorite Major League Baseball team.

Let’s take the Yankees as an example. To watch the Yankees on Direct TV you must buy the basic sports package which adds the YES Network which is the TV home for most of the Yankee’s games. That basic sports package is around $5.95 to $9.95 a month to your bottom-line bill.

Now those knuckleheads at Major League Baseball said that’s not enough. They cut a deal with Amazon Prime to air Major League Baseball Games usually on Thursday night, sometime Friday night games.

So, if you have Amazon, you must upgrade to Amazon Prime at $199.00 a year to catch quite a few Yankee games on Amazon Prime.

It doesn’t stop there; Major League Baseball places games on Apple TV. So, let’s say the Yankees are playing the Boston Red Sox and you want to watch the game. You have to pay for an Apple TV subscription, a yearly one by the way, to watch your “home team” play baseball.

In addition, Peacock streaming network is also carrying Major League Baseball games usually on Sundays, which is an additional service to watch.

(AP Photo/Dan Goodman, File)

Forbes magazine estimates that the rights deal to Major League Baseball from ESPN, FOX Apple TV, TBS and Peacock is worth over $2 billion a year. The New York Yankees sold their soul and took away the “free” games on local channels 11 and 9 and made a deal with Amazon Prime directly to air 20 Yankee games this 2023 season.

According to Sports Illustrated thanks to the increased revenue from their cut of the $2 billion network deals, the $143 million a year that the YES coverage brings in and the 20 games on Amazon Prime, the New York Yankee payroll went from $156 million to a staggering $261 million. The Yankee team’s gross revenue was $657 million.

It used to be simple. Turn on Channel 11 or 9 and watch the Yankees or Mets.

New York Yankees' Anthony Volpe walks on the field between innings of an exhibition baseball game against the Washington Nationals, Tuesday, March 28, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

When the cable outlets YES for the Yankees and SNY for the Mets came out, I said OK it’s worth the investment because 80% of the games will be on those networks and most of the remaining games were on local TV either channel 11 or 9. That’s not the case anymore.

I make a good living, grew up in the Bronx, and am a Yankee fan but they are leading me to find other things to do than pay multiple outlets to see them play. It is greed and lack of empathy for their fan base that upsets me so.

Watching the game on TV or streaming will soon cost as much as going to a Yankee game, in Seattle!

LOOK: Food history from the year you were born

From product innovations to major recalls, Stacker researched what happened in food history every year since 1921, according to news and government sources.