The Giants are only televising four Cactus League games
Plus the two Bay Bridge Series games, but still. C'mon, losers
Look, I’m not a business person. I never got an MBA, and I don’t have a bunch of spreadsheets that say why the fictional company I own will do better after I fire all my American employees and outsource their jobs. I’m just a guy who would like to turn on my TV and watch Giants baseball, and I would happily watch lots and lots of advertisements in order to do so.
Alas, that option is unavailable.
The Giants are only televising six Spring Training games this year out of the 33 they’ll end up playing. Of those six, two are the Bay Bridge Series in the Bay Area that closes out the exhibition schedule. I can’t speak for anyone else, but generally, at the end of Spring Training I don’t want to watch exhibition games; I want to watch games that count. So I’ll watch the Giants and A’s starters play 5 innings against each other, but not very enthusiastically. We’re almost at the real thing! Why would I get excited for the fake thing when I’ll have the real thing on Thursday?
I have no such reservations about the Cactus League, though. When games start in Arizona, they’re at the end of a long drought, where like the players are easing into the grind of a long regular season, the fans are too. So three innings of Brandon Crawford is better than zero innings, which is what we’ve all been dealing with for months, and we’ll take it. Our standards are lower. Over the course of a month and a half, we get into shape, ready to whine on Twitter about whatever petty annoyance is happening that we’ll have forgotten within the week.
But the important thing is this: our standards are low, and we’ll take any baseball we can get. Will I pretend to have an already existing emotional attachment to Brett Wisely just because he seems likely to make the roster? Yes, absolutely. Will I develop strong opinions about who should have the last spot in the bullpen based on one inning in one Cactus League game? You absolutely know it. Will I get overly excited about a so-so prospect who happens to tear it up for a week? That’s what Spring Training is for!
But instead, I don’t get to see those games. The Giants will broadcast four games from Arizona: tomorrow, against Team USA; March 12, against the A’s; March 19, against the Angels; and March 23, against the Guardians. Then they have the two games in the Bay Area against the A’s on March 26 and 27, and that’s it.
This is not enough games. And among big-market teams, this is uniquely not enough games. The Cubs are putting 33 games on TV this spring. The Dodgers are airing 30. The Angels — the Angels, not exactly a paragon of a successful franchise — are airing 26. Then you get to not-as-rich teams, and they’re still putting more of an effort in than the Giants are. The Guardians are airing 10 games. The Mariners are airing 9. Even the A’s — the Oakland Fucking Athletics, who have completely given up on being a major league franchise — are putting two games on TV and streaming another 9 on the NBC Sports app.
You know who else is only letting fans watch 6 Spring Training games? The Rockies. The Colorado Rockies. The Rockies are not a winning franchise, nor a storied one, nor a rich one. They simply exist. They just are, looming, like some sort of large mountain range. They have spent years quasi-killing fan excitement, not to the extent of the A’s or Reds, of course, but they have traded three franchise players since Tim Lincecum’s debut, and sure, they got a shiny-ish used Kris Bryant out of it, but there’s still only so much a fanbase can take.
This is the company the Giants are in. This is who they’re choosing to associate with. No, I haven’t crunched the numbers or considered expenses or looked at cost-benefit analyses for airing more Spring Training games or anything, but it doesn’t really matter. The point of this whole thing is to get fans interested and engaged in the season. You can’t do that if you’re not letting them watch the games.
I want to watch Giants Spring Training games. There are, I would assume, at least tens of thousands of people who agree with me. The Giants won’t let us. It’s baffling. It’s weird. Above all, it’s cramping my ability to tweet, in the middle of a game, “When’s Correa due up?”
MLB’s tv restrictions seem an almost deliberate attempt to minimize their own product. Let’s hope the Bally Sports business failure leads to an improved option for watching baseball - including Spring Training games.