Fox you, Fox

The New York Mets are playing a baseball game starting in a few minutes. It'll probably start before I finish writing this post, though it hasn't yet. It's a FOX game, meaning it gets played on Saturday afternoon (they used to be at 4 p.m., but this seems to be at 3) and the team's own broadcast doesn't get to carry it. I think I recall that there used to be only one FOX game each Saturday, but now there appear to be several, and since there's only one FOX channel showing these games, they have to decide which parts of the country see which games. Now, I'm currently located in Providence. They have apparently decided that, rather than watch the Mets and Nationals, I am most likely to be interested in the Detroit Tigers and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. I am currently located 147 miles from Citi Field in Queens, 359 miles from Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., 600 miles from Comerica Park in Detroit, and 2571 miles from Angels Stadium in Anaheim. But apparently they project me to care more about the Tigers and Angels.

The consequence of this is that I have no way to watch the game. No way whatsoever. Normally, when one's local TV doesn't carry a given game, that's because one is out of its market, and if one has an MLB.TV subscription one can watch the local broadcast online. For a national broadcast, like FOX or ESPN, you can't do that, of course, but, well, it's a national broadcast. You can't be out of market. Except that FOX isn't a true national broadcast: it's a national lottery broadcast, where you might get to watch the game you want. So all I can do is get up Gameday and listen to the Mets' radio broadcast over my computer, which is fine since Howie Rose and Josh Lewin are so much better than any FOX announcers. But still, the principle is supposed to be that you can watch any baseball game anywhere if you have the MLB.TV subscription. This is not the case in practice. The more routine problem is that the local blackout zones, areas where you can't watch a given game online because you're in one of the teams' local media markets, correlate only rather roughly with the actual range of the relevant TV stations. But there's also this problem that FOX blocks out multiple games every Saturday and only allow any given person to watch one of them. This is not acceptable, and eventually it's going to need to change. Either they could concoct some way to let people have access to any one of the three FOX games, or they need to let people watch those FOX games that they don't actually have TV access to online. Something needs to give here.