The evolution of being televised

Two years ago, cable television was pretty much your only option for watching the Seattle Mariners on a daily basis.

In fact, the lack of an à la carte option was a cause of great frustration for some Mariners fans.

This year, if you wanted to watch the Seattle Mariners on cable television, you had to wait until 5:09 a.m. Pacific time on Thursday, opening day, to receive an email from Major League Baseball telling you what channel Mariners TV will occupy on your local cable provider.

Then, as if that wasn’t confusing enough, the Friday game was on Apple Plus, and the Sunday game was streamed on NBC’s Peacock app.

(Deep sigh)

It wasn’t always this complicated.

In fact, it hasn’t ever been this complicated, and I’m going to somewhat foolishly attempt to explain the anarchy that is driving this madness.

Before we talk TV, we’ve got some baseball to get to.

The Mariners opened the season with four games against the Cleveland Guardians.

Seattle won two of those games and held the lead in each of the two it lost.

Ding, ding, dingers: The Mariners appear to have brought their whupping stick into the regular season. They scored 22 runs, their highest total through four games in seven years.

They used the same method for scoring these runs that they frequently employed last season: Hitting the ball over the fence.

Mariners hit eight home runs over the four games, which is the second-most in baseball.

This is not necessarily a surprise.

Seattle hit 238 home runs last season, which ranked third in all of baseball.

What was surprising against Cleveland: Who was hitting the home runs.

It wasn’t Cal Raleigh.

Or Julio Rodríguez.

Or Josh Naylor or Randy Arozarena.

Luke Raley hit three. Newly acquired Brendan Donovan hit two, as did Dominic Canzone. Even second baseman Cole Young had a dinger.

Whiff-le ball: It has been a slow start for the guys at the heart of the Mariners order.

Cal Raleigh was 1-for-15 during the series with 10 strikeouts. Julio Rodriguez was 1-for-15 with six strikeouts, and Josh Naylor has yet to log a hit this season.

I’m not worried about this, however. In fact, it’s a very promising sign that Seattle scored as much as it did despite the struggles at the heart of its lineup.

The Mariners TV schedule is more like a jigsaw puzzle than ever before as the team’s 162 games split in some form or fashion between eight different channels.

Eight!

And before I try to piece together how it came to be this way, I do want to offer a helping hand if you’re still trying to figure out which channel the team is on. Here’s the official guide from the team’s official site:

Before we start talking about stand-alone streaming options or regional sports networks, you need to know a little bit of history:

Once upon a time, sports teams worried that television would eat into their profits.

Yes, I know, it seems rather silly now because everything that these sports leagues do seems predicated upon television.

But back in the 1970s and even the ‘80s, teams worried that if too many games were televised, people would stop coming to the ballpark/stadium/arena.

That’s right, it wasn’t TV ratings that teams worried about most; it was attendance, because ticket sales were such a huge part of the business plan.

We will refer to this as the Dark Ages of modern sports. Team owners were not only ignorant that television was a goose capable of laying golden eggs, but they saw television as a predator.

As recently as 1992, only 50 of the Mariners’ 162 games were televised. Those games were carried by a pair of over-the-air broadcast stations: KIRO-7 (23 games) and KSTW (27 games).

Things changed in the 1990s.

Dramatically.

ESPN began televising Major League Baseball games in 1990.

Pretty quickly, local cable networks got in on the game.

In 1994, the Mariners struck their first cable TV deal with Northwest Cable Sports, which would become FOX Sports Northwest and eventually Root Sports NW. The first deal was for 25 games, but even that total was diluted first by the ceiling tiles falling in the Kingdome and then by the players' strike.

In 2000, the Mariners were reportedly receiving $30 million annually from their 10-year local TV deal. That deal was extended in 2007, with a report pegging the value at $450 million over the next 13 years. TV became such an important component of the baseball team’s business operations that in 2013, the Mariners bought a controlling interest in the regional sports network.

Seattle wasn’t alone.

For a good 15, maybe even 20 years, regional sports networks such as Root Sports NW produced huge windfalls for baseball franchises, NBA teams, college football conferences, and, to a lesser extent, the NHL.¹

The reason the rights became increasingly valuable was simple: Live sports were a magnet for subscribers for two reasons:

That second part became increasingly important over the past 15 years.

Sports seemed to be the one thing that would keep people from cutting the cord and canceling their cable subscription.

Live, local sports most specifically.

So cable companies would pay through the nose not just to carry the games, but for exclusivity. They wanted to be the only option for fans who wanted to see the local games.

This worked. For a while.

But at some point over the past five or six years, there was a tipping point.

Enough people had defected from cable that those companies were no longer willing (or in some cases able) to foot the huge rights fees they had agreed to.

Some regional sports networks stopped paying. Others renegotiated.

The Mariners, who own their own station, decided to shutter it after last season.

In TV terms, we’ve experienced the wholesale collapse of regional sports networks.

In layman’s terms, the way Americans watch their local baseball teams is undergoing a wholesale change. This is a significant change for the sport, and it may be a sign of where other sports may be headed.

The most straightforward option for watching the Mariners this season is to subscribe to Mariners TV for $19.99 per month or $100 per year.

There are only two complications so far as I can tell:

Here are the games that Mariners TV will not carry:

Right now, Major League Baseball finds itself caught between two worlds.

On the one hand, it is increasingly offering its customers direct access to local team games without a cable subscription.

However, it still wants to hold onto at least a sliver of the money from selling broadcast rights that will be part of a totally different subscription.

This creates a very frustrating reality: it’s becoming increasingly expensive to watch ALL of your team’s games.

It’s not just baseball where this is happening.

A cable subscription doesn’t get you access to the Thursday night NFL games carried by Amazon, nor the Christmas games on Netflix.

The Big Ten’s contract with NBC gives that company the right to stream some of the conference’s games on Peacock.

One of the big selling points of cutting the cord was that you would only pay for the games you wanted to watch. What they didn’t tell us is that the games we wanted to watch would be increasingly divided up and sold to competing networks.