Not since the Jersey Nets ran a guns-for-tickets promotion — Don’t miss your chance to sit beside a dangerous felon! — have I been more confused by a marketing strategy?
If you or I were the baseball commissioner at a time when a greed-driven absence of foresight found MLB bleeding viewers and interest, what would we do?
We’d do everything possible to make baseball telecasts available on the most affordable and widely viewed TV networks. No one would have to search for the games or pay more and more to watch. We’d try to restore baseball as the national pastime. Thus every fan, young and old, would know where to go and when.
In local throwback terms, the Mets once could be found on Ch. 9, the Yankees on Ch. 11. Then on SNY and YES. Once, as in three years ago.
We wouldn’t mess with conditioned TV habits because we’d recognize that this is no time to take baseball audiences for granted or sell the telecasts at auction.
But the Rob Manfred regime went the other way, challenging fans to spend more and to search harder if they wanted to watch baseball. Here, the Yankees have become an almost weekly Amazon Prime streaming operation exclusive.
Manfred and the Yankees’ shot-callers allowed the team’s games to become the cheese while devoted fans became lab rats in exchange for Amazon dough.
The Yankees-Angels game Wednesday was one of 20 mostly cherry-picked Yankees games this season to be hidden — held for ransom — behind Amazon Prime’s paywall. Thus, by financial design, it was lost to untold but cost-conscious tens of thousands.
Would you have commonly watched that game had it been on YES? I would have. But would I buy Amazon Prime to watch it? No. I refuse to fund MLB’s arrogant greed.
Another two Yankees games have been…