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At .500 in a league lousy with mediocrity, Red Sox watching this weekend requires another streamer
Sunday's Red Sox-Cardinals game will be streamed on Roku.
COMMENTARY
To call what happened in the bottom of the ninth Thursday at Fenway Park exciting would be to devalue English. It was notable.
It was exciting in the way a party you’re not invited to four houses down the street is. A blip in your periphery, but a different blip in your periphery, with a soundtrack you can just about pick up.
In brief, Tampa lost track of its mound visits in the ninth inning, and tried to make an extra with two on, two out, and the Red Sox down two runs. Umpires halted it between the time pitching coach — and Red Sox World Series champion — Kyle Snyder crossed the third-base line and actually spoke to his pitcher, and were prepared to call that good.
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Red Sox manager Alex Cora was vociferously, profanely not.
I look forward to the Cora-loving commenters really exploring the space of him being a stickler for the rules.
After eight-odd minutes, the umpires forced Tampa to change pitchers. (Cora was still unhappy afterward about warmup pitches.) Ultimately, what really mattered was that Cora still had to let Romy Gonzalez bat with the game on the line.
Gonzalez had a walkoff single on Tuesday, half of Boston’s for the year. But can’t let the story mess with some snark, can we?
And so, Cora’s Red Sox are 22-22. Since winning eight of 12, they’ve lost nine of 13, averaging three runs per game in the latter. They’re in fourth place after Thursday, 1-6 within the AL East, and — through injury and winter inaction — appearing closer to everyone’s expectations by the day.
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What a perfect time to make you jump through a new hoop to watch them play!
Sunday’s game against the Cardinals — another big-market team which isn’t hitting, though one that spent well on pitching this winter — will be on Roku, its first in the MLB Sunday Leadoff package that’s been on streaming peer Peacock for two years.
You’re forgiven if that’s news. The Red Sox featured on it once per season, and the first was simulcast on NBC — its first MLB broadcast in two decades.
This Sunday’s will be streaming only, without any extra cost for now. If you have a Roku — that remote in your remote pile with a purple tag sticking from it — or a smart TV, you likely know the drill. If you don’t, you’ve probably already stopped reading this.
The concept isn’t new, we luddites and pseudo-luddites will eagerly tell you. This is also the third season of Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball slate, and will be the second where paying for the service is required. The Sox are scheduled for three of them — May 24 and 31, plus June 28 against San Diego.
Given the shifting sands of sports-watching, Sox fans still have it pretty simple. NESN has 151 of the 162 games for now, with three ESPN Sunday nighters (including the Cubs game last month) and four Fox Saturdays mixed in.
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Even knowing NESN’s own issues, hard to access outside cable or the $30/month NESN 360 pricetag, it feels like these will soon be the good old days.
The NFL sold Christmas Day games to Netflix for the next three seasons, following deals with ESPN Plus (which exclusively gets the Chargers-Cardinals Monday nighter in October), Peacock (Week 1’s Brazil game), and Amazon Prime Video (the Thursday slate, Black Friday, and a wild-card playoff).
The NBA appears prepared to sell a chunk of games to Amazon, with NBC (and thus Peacock) likely pushing Warner Bros. Discovery (TNT) out. Four Bruins games this season — including March’s visit by Edmonton — were exclusive to ESPN+/Hulu, part of the small bloc it bought from the NHL.
All this before Venu Sports, the joint ESPN/Fox/Warner sports streamer supposedly coming this fall. Or before talking about the doozy.
Major League Soccer, which avoided the fragmented “where is my team playing today” argument by selling essentially its whole catalog for the next decade to Apple TV+ in 2022. Interested in the Revolution, or the league in any way? Outside of a slim group of weekend broadcasts and the occasional freebie still requiring you to pull up the Apple service, that’ll be $14.99/month.
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Man, do I hate it. “Be a diehard or go away” is a heck of a growth mindset.
It is impossible for me to believe that eliminating local broadcasts, as MLS did in its Apple deal, is a sustainable long-term strategy. At the moment, I’m an old crank — the Revs easily broke their per-game attendance record last season, averaging nearly 24,000, and that was before 65,612 for Lionel Messi. We’ll see what history says.
The lucky among us will live long enough to feel society fundamentally shift away from the reality we grew up with, and we will rail against it as our ancestors did and our progeny will too. We will be told to stop yelling at clouds and to calm down about the people on our lawns.
I just turned 44, and will likely be yelling about the superiority of the cable package era — turn on TV, pick channel, go — to a cornucopia of streaming services until I am fertilizer.
Imagine my joy, thus, when The Athletic’s Evan Drellich wrote Friday that MLB is mulling the idea of following the MLS model. In the face of the crumbling regional sports network model — not an issue here with NESN — nationalize broadcast rights. Sell the whole thing as a bundle.
It is quintessential Manfred, accepting the big payout and letting later be the next guy’s problem. It’s also mystifying for a sport whose place in the national consciousness is hardly booming, and whose Sunday morning game package which began this conversation just sold for $10 million/year when it previously sold for $30M.
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To say nothing of every broadcast, in nearly every sport, feeling almost secondary to the gambling money increasingly fueling the whole enterprise. There’s just something about making your customers work, and spend, for your product at the same time you’re not so quietly telling them the safest way to make it all interesting is to throw a couple fins on a same-game parlay.
We were far afield before, and I’ll save that tangent for another day. I bet we’ll have the chance to digress plenty.
“We saw a bunch of good starters for them and saw a bunch of relievers,” Rays manager Kevin Cash told reporters. “We had to have good at-bats, and we did, to win this series.”
After dropping three of four to the Rays in, to be fair, competitive games all, it’s back to feeling closer to a season where the surprise will simply be how long the fingernails stay on the ledge.
What foundational pieces will have their roots extend back into these days, when it was still about waiting for the prospect cavalry to arrive.
When the where we can watch the game will probably still be an issue, but the why we’re watching it will be self evident.
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