How MLB's Exclusive Deal with DirectTV Won't Stop Me or You From Watching Baseball

I am a from New Jersey and I love baseball. More specifically I love the Atlanta Braves. When I was growing up and getting into baseball everyone was either a Mets or a Yankees fan. This was around 1990, before the internet where you had 24 hour coverage of any team in any city you wanted. We were confined to whatever our local newspaper and and broadcasts gave us. I was always the type of kid who wanted to be different so I sought out a different team to follow. By chance there was another team which started getting broadcast just as much as the Mets or Yankees; The Atlanta Braves. They were owned by Ted Turner so most of their games you could watch nationwide on TBS.

A few years ago Ted Turner sold the Atlanta Braves and since then the amount of broadcasts per year has dropped significantly. That is why the MLB package provided by my local cable company was so important. I could not only watch any Braves game during the season but I could watch any game from any team during the season. I still had my Braves. Until this year, when it was announced that DirecTV bought an exclusive deal to be the only television provider that would have the MLB package. I had satellite before and I hate it. I was heartbroken to think about having to get a dish just so I could watch the Braves. There had to be something else out there and I found it in the MLBTV package from MLB.com.

You are probably saying the same thing I said, "Who wants to watch baseball on their computer?". The picture is great quality but yes, it will be considerably smaller than your plasma screen. Once you get over that you will find that all the features you get with the package is well worth the trade off. You get every game played as long as it is not blacked out regionally. Along with the television broadcast of each game you also get the home and away radio broadcast of each game. I love the radio feature as I find a good baseball broadcaster a million times more enjoyable to listen to than the jerks they usually have on television. They also have an option during the regular season where you can have up to six games being played on your screen at once and alerts when your fantasy players are coming to bat.

If your team has on off day you can mess around with a few on demand options. You can actually go back to any game played last year by any team and either watch the television broadcast or listen to the home or away radio broadcast. If that isn't enough you can also look at all their old classic games on demand featuring some of the best playoff games of all time like game six of the 1995 World Series or milestone games such as Roger Clemens first or second 20 strikeout game.