Apple and Major League Baseball to Offer “Friday Night Baseball” | Hacker News Reader

Apple and Major League Baseball to Offer “Friday Night Baseball”

apple.com

53 pointstodsacerdoti62 comments

Terrible timing for the announcement.

Currently the players and owners are negotiating a new CBA - a week of games has already been cancelled and if negotiations don't get figured out more and more will get cancelled.

Fans are kind of pissed off - so publishing this "exciting" news that is obviously very MLB friendly may backfire a bit.

yup! lets not also forget that fan attendance and TV viewership have plummeted (and not came back like the NFL's fan base) for MLB.

Stadium avg attendance - https://www.statista.com/statistics/235634/average-attendanc...

Viewership down as well - https://frontofficesports.com/mlb-attendance-hits-37-year-lo...

Contrast that to the NFL which is seeing record viewership now - https://sportsnaut.com/nfl-tv-ratings-viewership-numbers/

Baseball is just not an entertaining sport to watch.

It's possible tastes have changed, but historically it's been pretty popular in the US. I think the games going much slower and longer and the change of the game to be more about power hitting and strikeouts at the expensive of balls in play has made it worse even for the people who might otherwise still be interested.

Pitching changes lead to a commercial break - and current coaching strategies lead to frequent changes. Combine that with everyone consistently swinging for the fences vs. putting the ball in play with runners aboard, and the game gets tedious to watch.

Baseball had a first mover advantage which helped them a lot. Playing just about every day also helped create a routine for people. But as new generations come people are realizing that baseball has the least to offer among the big 4 sports in the US.

Baseball is one of the worst sports for television because the game is done when the game is done. That just doesn't work so well for the half-hour time slots that TV uses. All these dumb rule changes lately to try to get the games to always take no more than 3 hours is MLB trying to fit the TV model.

In-person and streaming don't have this constraint. That's what MLB should be emphasizing. So this is a great move. We need baseball to be an in-person/streaming-first, tv-last game. Then just say "we're not like the others, how about enjoying baseball and your other favorite sport?"

I'd beg to differ. Especially in Japan, it's an incredibly popular sport. The problem is that MLB does not have a single clue how to market it, especially to younger fans. Not only that, but it continues to lose lifelong fans whenever the owners cause a work stoppage (like the current one).

I think part of the problem is there are 162 games in a regular season. It's way too much. Hell, I like baseball, but rarely watch a regular season game unless it has big implications for the playoffs, and usually only read recaps or watch the highlights, because who has time for watching that many games really?

Baseball would be such a different sport if there were say 40 games per season instead of 160. You would need far fewer pitchers too if there were only 2 games per week.

There is more randomness in an individual baseball game that necessitates a longer season to crown a winner. Football teams have gone undefeated during the regular season. The best regular season basketball teams of all time have won close to 90% of their games. The baseball team with the most regular season wins in the last century had a record of 116-46 for a winning percentage of just under 72%.

There is and old baseball saying that no matter how good you are, you're going to lose one-third of your games. No matter how bad you are you're going to win one-third of your games. It's the other third that makes the difference.

40 games simply wouldn't be enough to figure out which teams are actually good.

If the season were shorter the tactics would be very different and what you said might not be true anymore. For instance you might only need 2 starting pitchers. If you can have Scherzer pitch half your games that’s gonna be very different than having him pitch 1/4 of your games. There’s also the playoffs to consider as a case study. There you have far fewer games so the strategy is very different, and arguably the games are more interesting.

I don't think there is much reason to think that would happen. We don't see evidence of that in the regular season as Scherzer's career record is 190-97. We don't see evidence of that in the postseason when even the best teams will generally lose a few games. And we don't see evidence of that in baseball history when in the past a team's best pitcher might start up to half of that team's games. Randomness is just inherent to the game of baseball.

Why do they have so many pitchers now? I just looked up the 2019 Yankees roster [1] and see 30 pitchers. For comparison I checked the 1927 Yankees roster [2] and see 10 pitchers.

In 1927 they played 154 game seasons, so I doubt the season being 6 games shorted than the current 160 game season explains the '27 Yankees only needing 1/3 the number of pitchers.

[1] https://www.baseball-almanac.com/teamstats/roster.php?y=2019...

[2] https://www.baseball-almanac.com/teamstats/roster.php?y=1927...

I don't know the real answer, but my guess is: Pitchers these days pitch harder, train harder, and put more spin on the ball (putting more load on their arm/shoulder). Also, there are more tactical usage of pitchers (putting in someone to get the next out and that's it).

The tactical swapping is part of it, especially since once a pitcher is taken out they can’t go back in for the rest of the game. A lot of the roster pitchers are backups and relievers who don’t play many innings. The starters usually take at least 3 days rest after pitching.

Fan attendance was limited by Covid-related restrictions for the first half of the season, and the Blue Jays played in Buffalo in a minor league ballpark for part of the year. By the time the NFL season started the capacity restrictions had been lifted. The TV ratings are a worrying trend for most leagues other than the NFL.

True, its why I also listed the link for TV viewership also falling. If 2022 doesn't end up losing alot to contract disputes, this years park attendance should come up alot from 2021.

I just want to add that when a CBA expires, the old one remains in effect until both sides can agree to a new deal. Therefore, if both sides wanted to, they could be playing baseball right now. The players were amenable to this. The owners were not and locked out the players. This dispute is almost entirely because the billionaire owners don't think they make enough money despite all public evidence showing that owning a baseball team is wildly profitable.

This is true, but I think it's slightly disingenuous to not include what happened in 1994 when the players and owners agreed to play without a CBA in place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994–95_Major_League_Baseball_...

I was an MLB.TV subscriber for a number of years, back when there were no blackout restrictions (or ads) in Canada. It was a really great service.

The thing I learned very quickly was that most local team broadcasts were orders of magnitude more entertaining than the "neutral" national broadcasts, even for a new fan learning the game. The great local broadcasters have the solid on-screen chemistry that only comes from doing 100+ games a year, and an actual point of view without being bald-faced homers. It's a lot more fun to watch.

The national broadcasts, on the other hand, seem to be aimed at people who hate watching baseball.

In a three game series, I'd watch the home team broadcast for game 1, the away team broadcast for game 2, and the better of the two for game 3. If a game was national broadcast I'd usually just skip it. In the playoffs, I always listened to the local team radio broadcasts synced up to the video.

In recent years MLB has experimented with broadcasting some games on Facebook and YouTube, and the result is always awful and hated by most fans. I don't expect the Apple TV+ version to be any different. It'll be baseball for people who don't want to watch baseball.

Anyway, MLB.TV turned to crap in Canada, so I no longer watch. MLB produces some great content, and then does everything in their power to prevent people from watching it.

This is the same for football, if you have 5 channel surround then I learned on the interwebz that you can mute just the announcers by pulling the center channel. So what we do is that and just turn on the local radio commentary.

I often used the MLB app’s ability to play the local radio audio instead of TV audio. There’s still some good ol’ drunk radio announcers in baseball.

Very annoying move by MLB. If you care about local sports, you have a cable package - possibly for ONLY that reason - and now they want you to buy something else too on top of that very expensive cable package.

Pushing people away.

Yea, "Friday Night Baseball" means further fragmentation of where the games appear. I get that the leagues are paid by each of the companies broadcasting, but at some point they are making it more difficult for people to become fans for the future.

College sports are even worse a lot of times. You have them on ESPN, the networks for some games, then a conference channel, then possibly a separate conference streaming service. I just don't subscribe to any of those now, while I could afford to subscribe to all of them. I'm just done with these shenanigans.

Yep in here in North Texas we had Fox Sports Southwest to watch all Dallas Mavericks, Dallas Stars, and Texas Rangers (NBA, NHL, MLB). But now they are on Bally's which had some sort of dispute so they are no longer on Hulu/YouTubeTv. To make it all worse now Bally's is going to come out with their own application next year that you will need to subscribe to. I love basketball and we currently have Luka Doncic but I have just given up.

> but I have just given up

Same, and this means my kids have never watched.

So, if you want to watch any game on any given night, you need

- a cable package for ESPN, etc

- the MLB.tv package

- Apple+

Guessing a lot of bars are going to find alternate Friday night programming.

You don't need cable for ESPN. In fact, there's a great Disney bundle that includes Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+.

ESPN+ doesn't include most ESPN/ESPN2 programming. There are other "non-cable" packages that do include that programming, but they have a price point that resembles cable.

Haha streaming is officially worse than cable. It was only a matter of time, really.

> Guessing a lot of bars are going to find alternate Friday night programming

Do you mean that they will be showing baseball (because people can't watch it at home) or won't be showing baseball (because they won't buy Apple TV+)?

$4.99/mo isn't really an interesting amount for a bar to pay to get access to Friday night games. If they need a public performance license (depending on the size of their space or the size of their TVs), they'll be paying a lot more than that.

If anything, I'd think that bars would welcome this if it means more people coming to the bar to watch the game. If the bar can pay $5/mo and people come because they don't want to individually pay $5, that's a huge win for the bar. People come and drop a lot more than $5 on beer/food/snacks.

> If they need a public performance license

There is a 100% chance they will require a licence. For example:

https://plus.espn.com/business

(I ma geoblocked from that page, weirdly by a JS redirect long after the page loads)

As a TMobile customer, I've been getting MLB.TV free for years, but sadly due to the MLB it's basically been worthless because of black out rules.

The Cubs have hated their fans since winning the world series and the majority of their games are now only available on an extremely regional cable network instead of the over the air WGN. I have no intention of ever getting cable and annoyingly signing into my parents account also doesn't work due to the station being regional. I suspect the MLB is losing out on huge numbers of younger fans like me who stream only, would like to watch games, but literally only watch a couple games a year in person because it's such a hassle to try and watch at home.

This is only an exciting development if the games aren't subject to black out rules, which I doubt.

The Cubs have hated their fans since winning the world series and the majority of their games are now only available on an extremely regional cable network instead of the over the air WGN.

The frustration of finding the Cubs on TV is what drove me back to radio.

If I'm lucky, I can catch the game on a powerful AM station at night when it's out of town. If not, the game is on Sirius, to which I already subscribe.

Will be tricky if things continue the way they are...

For those not following. There is no baseball, the players are on strike (or locked out) in a labor dispute.

Technically it's not a strike. The current incident is all on the owners. A lockout wasn't something they had to do.

Now that's not to say players wouldn't have done a strike at some point. But we should make sure the appropriate party is described.

Definitely not on strike, and I think it's important to understand that. The owners have locked out the players since December of last year, and waited over 40 days before opening negotiations.

Yet another "exclusive" distribution platform. I swear sports leagues and media companies are doing everything in their power to drive away casual fans. Why is watching MLB/NFL/NBA games so difficult in this country??

You answered your own question. Exclusive distribution deals reduce competition and increase price. We could have a much better market if producers were required to sell their content at a fixed, public price to any distributor willing to pay it.

Why is it taking so long for the sports organizations to directly sell sports from their own websites and apps?

Is selling ads that complicated? Surely major sports leagues have had plenty of years to hire and build up staff. I even thought MLB pioneered some of the live video stream technology being used today. Why would they want to involved another party between them and their audience?

Pre-existing TV deals. For example, the rights to non-national NBA games are sold to LocalCableCompany SportsNet. On occasion, these games get promoted to one of that national rights holders (TNT, ESPN/ABC) so there's some mechanism for that in the contract. But the league is no doubt precluded from selling to the local cable channel and then undercutting them via their own website.

TL;DR - it's not a technical problem but a licensing problem that will solve itself once the contracts expire.

Yes, but video streaming has been out for 5+ years. How long are these licensing deals?

I guess they must be betting that the TV deals will earn them more money in the short term than snubbing them and hoping to build up their audience directly.

But I wonder how many new generation viewers they are losing. Or perhaps major sports was inevitably going to decline anyway compared to alternative entertainment options, so might as well milk the cow while they can.

TV deals are usually somewhere on the order of 10 years long. And as you said, they are betting that the TV contracts are earning them more than selling direct to consumers would. Because once they go direct to consumer, the TV deals are gone. ESPN isn't going to pay $1 billion per season for Monday Night Football if the NFL is trying to steal viewers from them.

There's also a ton of added complexity for them aside from the streaming, including having to staff and schedule production facilities for every game. It's not insurmountable, but it's also something they don't deal with today.

I'd also note that selling directly to customers can mean fewer viewers. For a long time, people complained about cable bundles because they were paying for things they didn't want. Now people are complaining because they need to pay for 5-10 different subscriptions.

If a sports league makes a deal with ESPN and most people get ESPN as part of a bundle, a lot of people are going to watch who might not otherwise watch. If you need to buy NFL-TV to watch a game, many people will simply not watch the game.

Think about how many things that are included with Netflix that you've watched, but you'd never pay for individually. Sports leagues don't want to put people in the situation of deciding if they like the sport enough to pay for it individually. They'd rather have their programming as part of a larger bundle that customers already pay for. Hard-core fans would pay for their sports league, but they'd lose out on all the casual fans, people who might watch a game or two a week (and wouldn't feel like paying for so many games was worth it to them), and people who might watch a game with other people if it was on (and free).

Direct to consumer will almost certainly mean fewer viewers. You're cutting out casual fans completely, because they can't just flip on the game when they feel like watching.

They only worked because the only entertainment pipe into your house was a one way coaxial cable.

MLB has mlb.tv which as you noted was started out of MLB Advanced Media (which iirc got sold to Disney). But TV contracts are extremely lucrative for them and fanbases have attachments to their local announcer crew who are employed by the TV networks.

Interesting, I had not thought about announcing crews. As a casual viewer, I simply do not watch sports anymore since it is too difficult for me to figure out how to watch.

I do not mind paying, but it better be as simple as going to the sports org’s website and clicking next to the matchup in the schedule. And I am not paying a middleman.

Yeah, for example if you're watching a Sox/Yankees game and you're out of market and thus eligible to use mlb.tv you can select between either the NESN or Yes stream. Unless ESPN picked up the game for the night, and then you just can't watch it.

MLB Advanced Media still exists, the streaming business specifically was spun off into its own company (Bamtech Media) which was later acquired by Disney but still operates MLB.TV to this day. However, MLB Advanced Media still handles everything digital that is not the actual MLB.TV broadcasts.

Ah thanks for the clarification

It's far more lucrative apparently to only sell their sports to regional sports networks and such.

So while they make MLB.tv an option to fans, it really only works (in most cases) for fans who live outside of their favorite team's region. Otherwise they're "blacked out".

Other commenters correctly pointed out that it's because of the TV deals which preclude home grown streaming services, but they seem to believe that once those deals end the leagues will switch to their own streaming services. I'm not so sure. These TV deals have values in the billions. Will the owners really be willing to risk billions of dollars for the chance to make a few more billions? I know that I'd be happy to ride the gravy train as long as it's coming.

Setting up their own services is risky. Most viewers aren't willing to pay extra for individual games or leagues, they want an entire sports package. People are slow to make changes. I'd expect leagues to lose huge amounts of money the first year or two if they created their own service while they try to sign people up. The most palatable way for sports to get into streaming seems like it'd be to team up with an existing streaming service, Amazon seems like the most likely contender here. But the problem with that is one of the biggest advantages of streaming sports is being able to have seamless gambling integration in the service. I'm not sure the big streamers would be interested in that.

If baseball comes back, you mean. The owners don't really care to open those doors currently.

Friday night double-header is a halfway decent idea, local market baseball games are already a pain to track down unless you have a baseball-specific TV package. I don't have apple TV but more people I know probably have that than Bally Sports (in ATL).

Interesting it's available in eight countries: "United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, and will expand to additional countries at a later date."

Baseball is a very popular sport in many of these countries, especially Mexico, Japan, and Puerto Rico. I’d posit a guess that they continue to roll it out to other Latin American countries next.

I don't know about the rest of Latin America, but baseball is not popular at all in Brazil

I’m in the UK and have MLB TV. Hope these games aren’t blacked out.

They have been delaying the robo-umpire deployment so long.. usually would rather watch MLW Wiffleball on YouTube. They have no problem with strikezones ever.

Baseball is a really dated game to be honest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com