Opening Day, or, an Ode to Illegal MLB Streams
Hello! Welcome to Fourth Base, a public journal about baseball. With gratitude (and apologies) to Sam Miller’s [This Month] in Noticing and Ben Clemens’ Five Things I Liked This Week, I’ll use this space to share notes on the interesting, uninteresting, and unusual from a season in baseball-watching.
I’m Andrew. You may not know me from such outlets as Bear Insider and the late Cal Golden Blogs, covering Cal athletics. I’m a baseball obsessive—primarily Giants—but with painfully few fellow fans in my immediate circle I often find myself trying to justify my love of the game. So this is my attempt to collate what I find wonderful about baseball, written primarily for the patient non-fan and the baseball-curious. Expect a couple of entries per week throughout the season. Thanks for reading!
Ah, Opening Day. The green of the grass, the crack of the bat, the hot of the dog. And me, at home, regionally blacked out from watching the game.
For the unfamiliar, Major League Baseball offers a reasonably-priced streaming package for TV and radio broadcasts of all MLB games, but due to licensing agreements and stubborn greed, fans living in the region where their team plays are blacked out from watching their games. Buy a ticket or a TV package, or you’re out of luck. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Pity the fans in Las Vegas, blacked out of San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Anaheim, Denver, and Phoenix markets.
Short of paying $70-something a month for YouTube TV, a fan’s only recourse is turning to a life of piracy. Thankfully, an armada of sites—bearing a panoply of unfamiliar and ever-changing URL suffixes as they attempt to outrun regulators—offers safe harbor for the wayward baseball watcher.
This turns following your team into a game of its own, casting about for a functional stream each time the last goes dark. Many of these sites don’t carry your team’s home broadcast, or are too glitchy to tolerate over the course of a three-hour broadcast, or pepper you with incessant pop-up ads that no right-minded person would ever click. Such is the cost of free, though, and all can be tolerated when you find a stable- stream for your chosen game. All that is required is patience and the barest of online literacy.
Worst of all, though, is the live chat often found scrolling down the right side of the screen. There is typically one chatroom displayed across every stream on a given site, so as you watch, your sidebar burbles away with context-free inanities about a variety of teams and sports from around the world. That would be fine, were it not for the toxic waste products created by hundreds of sports fans brought together and granted unmoderated online anonymity. In a time where internet discourse has grown increasingly poisonous, illegal sports stream chats are the breeding grounds for the inventive insults and toe-curling slurs of tomorrow. Fans of teams that aren’t even in competition sling sludge at each other for hours. It’s nasty stuff, and worth whatever viruses clicking that tiny close window button might expose you to if doing so means escape.
But today, perhaps in celebration of Opening Day, the baseball gods blessed me with a silky-smooth stream and, even better, the chat window that was minimized by default. I shan’t be linking it here—this pirate has a long voyage ahead. Regardless, the Giants lost to the Padres, six to four. Ah, baseball.