Friday By Request

From Talkin Baseball Word Art by Digitalegacies Designs

Let me start by telling everyone that the nature and process of the seven layers of the OSI Model in Networking is essential to understanding, well, everything else in networking. It was also half of the first week of my Intro to Networking class. Our instructor told us we’d need to read the chapter at least twice to fully understand it. Boy was he right! But I think I have a good understanding to take with me as I keep learning now!

Summer semester if half the weeks of the other semesters, so it’s intense and accelerated! I love being challenged like that! Of course, I’m only taking one class right now, but I’m also planning our small, but still detailed, reception, trying to keep up with my responsibilities at Scrap Bird and I’m also in physical therapy for my knee. My plate is full!

So, in that very involved last week, I got a request for Friday in time to do it, but I couldn’t pull my nose out of my text book to do it! This week is connectors and radio signals. I’m learning how they work into the OSI model, but the “new” information is old information for me. I constructed cables in my old cable TV job and I’ve passed the FCC test twice, having to understand waveforms and signal measurements, to become licensed in high school and then again as part of the curriculum in trade school. So this week, I can breathe a little and catch up!

So here was the question I got from Seamhead Gypsy:

“Can you give me a logical reason that makes sense why MLB/Direct TV Extra Innings has said that living in New Bremen, Ohio is a market for the Detroit Tigers?” Last week, when the Red Sox were in Detroit, he couldn’t watch the game on NESN (New England Sports Network).

Logical reason, I can provide that, but it doesn’t makes sense to me either!

America’s Capitalist Pastime
For Seamhead Gypsy

First off, I agree that New Bremen, Ohio is definitely not in the Tigers market at all. David got to watch the Red Sox games because we get the Tigers games on Fox Sports Detroit in Toledo. But if a Red Sox fan is PAYING to see Red Sox games, he or she should be able to watch them from the Red Sox bias too! In our house, at least half of us appreciates the Tigers bias for those games, but if I wasn’t in the picture and David had paid to see the Red Sox games, he shouldn’t have to watch the Tigers broadcast either.

New Bremen, Ohio is closest to Columbus as far as the larger Ohio cities go, that’s about the farthest Ohio city there is from Detroit. Part of the trouble here is satellite TV! I know many people think it’s great and all, but I consider myself a Direct TV survivor. I was in a DTV household for a year and that contract couldn’t end fast enough. Direct TV isn’t local, part of the reason they have no idea what the local market really is. I mean, the Windsor, Ontario channels weren’t considered local to Detroit, but Detroit is local to New Bremen, Ohio? What are those surfer dudes in California smoking before they head to work at Direct TV? Obviously, the same stuff they were smoking in geography class!

But I think the bigger picture here is once again sapping the fans for everything they’re worth. MLB does a lot of “mo money” stuff. Like I said, if you pay to see the games on TV, you should ALWAYS get what you’re paying extra for and you should have it the way YOU want it. David has a paid subscription to listen to games on the radio. Why because MLB wanted the revenue from the local radio stations that were streaming their content on the web. Never mind that now you pay to listen to the radio, advertisements and all. If MLB wants to sell the play by play of the game, they should do it themselves commercial free.

Think about that. If you see a personal website with lots of ads, you know it’s a free site. So, I’m thinking MLB is selling content they get for free. It’s 100% profit for them and 100% rip-off for the fans and the radio stations. If I were selling advertising for the radio station, I could increase my ad sales by coaxing national or regional advertisers with the number of hits during games on the web. Instead, I lose revenue from advertisers who had that idea already, when my listening base decreases because it’s now a premium service sold by MLB.

Is it legal? Probably, but barely. None of us could get away with it. Is it ethical? Absolutely not. If other companies advertising has to be made available to baseball fans at a cost for the league to make ends meet, perhaps the league has outgrown what its market actually thinks its product is worth. They are exploiting fans much in the same way a drug dealer exploits addicts. Once you have a taste and really like it, they’ll charge you more and more for it. Hey, someone has to pay those MILLIONS of dollars a year salaries.

There needs to be a decent system of salary caps. Not on a per team basis, but on a per player basis. It might fix a lot of the problems with major league baseball. I mean, once you reach that ceiling, you don’t need to look at other opportunities that leave the local fans in the dust and you don’t need to increase you performance with drugs to achieve job security or to make more money than the next guy.

But until such a time that fans are no longer victims of owners and players greed, they’ll keep finding ways to charge us for new things that were free before and the obscenely wealthy will keep getting wealthier while it takes a greater portion of a fans salary to enjoy a game that used to be for everybody. But hey, people like teachers, police officers, fire fighters, they can afford that. Such important jobs are equally overpaid, right? Right?

For the average person, Baseball was a saving grace in the last economical depression. This time, for fans, it’s one of the leading causes.