Today the 2007 Major League Baseball season gets underway at 8:05 PM EDT, with the St. Louis Cardinals kicking off their defense of their World Series title at home against the New York Mets. I’ll leave the predictions to Mike, especially when it comes to the National League, as I’ve not followed the offseason moves there very closely (I pretty much agree with his AL picks. As a White Sox fan I don’t want to admit it, but I think the wild card is the best they’ll do this year. But who knows, that’s the most brutal division in baseball, where anything can happen. Maybe John Danks will have a breakout year).

No, instead I come here to recap a longstanding rant of mine from my personal site, my utter frustration at the absurdity that is the MLB blackout rules. The second rule is pretty simple. ESPN has exclusive rights to Sunday night, so if you want to watch a game that night, that’s the one you’re watching, and that’s where you’re watching it. Since there’s only ever one Sunday night game, this is no big deal. Fox has exclusive rights to most of the day Saturday. This is indeed pretty annoying, because if the Fox Saturday game isn’t the one you’d like to watch, and your team is playing at the same time, you won’t get to see it, even if you have a channel that would normally carry it. But as silly as that rule is, it’s not the one which causes the biggest amount of problems. That would be the first rule:

Local broadcast and cable stations which contract with a team to show their games in the local market have priority to televise those games over national broadcasters (assuming that the national broadcaster does not have exclusive rights to the game, as discussed below.) If ESPN telecasts a game, and the game was scheduled to be telecast by the local rights holder, the game will be blacked out on ESPN in that market (usually replaced by ESPNEWS). Similar blackouts occur on other networks which telecast nationally, such as TBS and WGN, although these would be considered local broadcasts in Atlanta and Chicago respectively since the networks only cover their local team (the game would be blacked out in the opponents market only.)

But what’s this mean in plain English? The first thing you need to understand is what your “home area” is. Luckily there’s a helpful but confusing map. We’ll take my city of Indianapolis as our example. As you can see from the map, we’re considered in the home area for three teams, the Chicago White Sox, Chicago Cubs, and Cincinnati Reds. This means that when one of those teams is involved in an ESPN weekday night national game, we get that game blacked out in favor of local coverage. Now there’s actually a good reason for this. Unlike the NFL, where there’s one TV contract and teams share revenue, MLB teams are free to pursue their own contracts in their home area. This revenue is a critical part of a team’s income, so I totally understand why the national feed gets blocked out. The Yankees and the Red Sox, for example, both get big parts of their revenue from their games being on YES and NESN respectively, and if they had to compete with the ESPN national feed for the approximately 7,296 Yankees and Red Sox games ESPN insists on showing each year, it would have a real effect on those teams’ bottom lines. The same is true even for lower revenue smaller market teams like your Kansas Cities of the world.

So, this should all work fine, right? Just watch your local market feed for your favorite area team. If you’re a Cincinnati Reds fan, you can flip over to Fox Sports Indiana, which has a contract with the Reds, and watch all you want. If you’re a White Sox or Cubs fan, you can… Oh wait. YOU CAN’T DO A DAMN THING. See, the MLB blackout rules fail to take one important thing into account when blacking you out for local feeds. They don’t check and see if you actually have a “local rights holder”. There’s no station offered by my cable company which has a full TV contract with the White Sox or Cubs. Thus, during the tight division and wild card race last year between the White Sox, Tigers, and Twins, where ESPN was showing lots of games between these three teams, I missed all of them involving the White Sox. This despite being a White Sox fan and ostensibly living in their home area.

It gets better. Take a look at MLB.TV, baseball’s Internet video service. Or MLB Extra Innings, the giant baseball cable package, which I can get through my cable system. Since I can’t get the White Sox local feed, I’d actually be happy to pay for one of these services if I could watch White Sox games on it. But yet again, all White Sox, Cubs, and Reds games are blacked out on both these services for me. MLB has a product they’d (one assumes) like to sell, and I’d like to buy it. Yet they refuse to sell it to me. They won’t let me buy the games I want to see for any amount of money. Their own bizarre rules, intended to help teams maximize revenue, essentially result in them leaving revenue on the table.

What’s also absurd is here in Indianapolis we’ve got it easy. First, any of us White Sox and Cubs fans are lucky that WGN out of Chicago (which we do get) shows a subset of Cubs and White Sox games, which we can see. If it weren’t for that, we’d only ever get to see our teams if they were picked for an ESPN Sunday night game of a Fox Saturday game. Also, we’re only blacked out for a mere two teams (since we get the Reds on Fox Sports Indiana, as I mentioned above). Take a look again at that map, this time at Iowa. The entire state of Iowa is considered in the home area for a ridiculous six teams, the Cubs, White Sox, Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers, Minnesota Twins, and St. Louis Cardinals. That’s six teams that if you happen to be a fan of one of them, you can’t see in Iowa most likely. On any given day, you could be blacked out for up to twelve different teams on Extra Innings if all six of these teams are playing, and none of them are playing each other. Is there anyone in Iowa who bothers with Extra Innings?

Finally, what makes this even more annoying is that it would be trivial to fix. Instead of just blacking out a team’s home area completely, MLB could use a little common sense, and only black you out if there’s a local feed for the team on your home cable system. This would preserve teams’ local TV revenue without costing them a dime. The White Sox don’t have to worry about me costing them money by watching a Tuesday night game on Extra Innings, because that’s the only way I’d have to watch the game anyway. So that would be one more Extra Innings subscriber, which they’d get a share of. Not as good as exclusive revenue, but better than the revenue they’re getting from Indianapolis now, which is nothing. In fact, my proposed rule change might show the White Sox more opportunities for money. Chicago baseball teams are quite popular here, and perhaps if the White Sox and Cubs saw a large amount of people here watching White Sox and Cubs games weeknights on ESPN, or buying Extra Innings to watch those games, they’d see an oppotunity for revenue. Maybe some local TV station like WTTV would see the potential and would sign a contract with the White Sox or Cubs to offer them locally. In that case, the blackout could go back into effect except for the local contract holder.

It’s an amazingly simple solution that would make it easier for potential viewers to watch the MLB product, and bring baseball teams more revenue from areas where they now get none. So come on Bud Selig, it’s time to start living up to your promise from last year to do something about this insanity. If fixing this mess isn’t “in the best interest of baseball”, then what is?

UPDATE: I should add that now you can’t even get Extra Innings anymore unless you have DirecTV, yet another decision by MLB to make their product as difficult to watch as possible. Deadspin explains. Since I live on the second floor of an apartment building where my windows face… another apartment building, I couldn’t get DirecTV if I wanted to get it. Still, I’d actually consider the MLB.TV Internet service if I could get White Sox games on it.

UPDATE 2: The old link to the home area map is broke, whoever posted it must have moved the image. Here’s another one.