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Opening Day Edition
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Baseball's Dot Comedy of ErrorsMarch 30, 2001 It's hard to say whose stock is falling more rapidly: Pets.com or the clue factor of Major League Baseball. OK, so Pets.com is already bankrupt after being worth billions on paper. Major League Baseball is full of cash, billions and billions of dollars, and keeps crying out that it's on the verge of bankruptcy. So it's not a fair comparison. However, this past week Major League Baseball announced a partnership with Real Networks, Inc. (It's not enough that Baseball has its own President, but the deal with Real Networks gets them their own Senator, too, Maria Cantwell of Washington, former head muckety-muck of the company that made the internet safe for low-fidelity audio and unviewable video. I digress.) The bottom line of this partnership is that all those nifty lo-fi baseball games you used to be able to get on your computer via the internet for free will now cost you a whopping $9.95 per year, or $30 something if you buy a higher-fidelity upgrade to the freebie RealAudio player at the same time you sign up for the season. There's actually nothing that wrong with this deal on face value. Not only does the ten bucks get you all the audio for every game broadcast this year, it gets you a ten dollar coupon to buy some crap off the MLB.COM website. So it's almost "free". Right? Well, let's ignore the obvious answer to that, that it was really free last year and now it's not. Or the obvious next step, which is price hikes in future years. Speaking as a dislocated Red Sox fan, being able to get those tinny broadcasts piped over my 28K modem line is a bargain even at $9.95. Sort of reminds me of listening to a bad AM radio just on the edge of the reception range growing up on Cape Cod as a kid. But the real insanity here is MLB's belief that this is going to be a revenue stream. I'm a major fanatic -- heck, I AM the self-styled Baseball Crank, right? -- so there'll be a few thousand or so combined internet and baseball geeks like me who'll sign up for the thing and be glad. But a revenue stream? Sure, Real has ponied up $20 million for the "rights" to Internet Broadcasts for the next three years and is splitting the take above that with MLB. But we've got no way of knowing how much money they'll actually make. I suspect Real has to do this just so they can continue to justify their business model in the Brave New post-NASDAQ-bust dot-calamity of all the Ponzi-scheme make-nothing Internet companies going bust. Real does make cool products that deliver content fairly well, but it remains to be seen if they or anyone can make money by actually charging for content. Bear in mind, this is the first year of MLB, the Corporation, reeling in the "Internet Rights" it got voted by the owners last year. It's taken in all the individual team websites, so they call have the same graphic-laden samey look and feel and have all the individuality of a row of un-rubbed baseballs sitting in Harry Wendelstadt's locker. Just because you can charge for something online doesn't mean you should -- or you're going to make money off it. Rumours abound that MLB was actually contemplating charging for statistics -- I'm talking about the actual stats, not a stat feed or a stat service, aka bucks for boxscores -- which I expect would kill most rotisserie leagues in the country pretty fast. They didn't go ahead and do it, but I think only because they couldn't quite figure out how. I've actually got a digressive little story along these lines. Back in the late 1980s, when the Internet was still a completely non-commercial network mostly for academics, I ran an FTP site (that, children, is how you got files before this Wuh-Wuh-Wuh stuff) called The Internet Baseball Archive. It was basically just a repository for baseball-related things in electronic format. We had the words to 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame', major league schedules that had been laboriously keyed in by hand, even some primitive graphics of ballpark diagrams. One of the items we had up was a scan of an old copy of the rules of baseball. No one was making a dime off this, and the rules were just up there for reference. I got, one day, much to my surprise, a "cease and desist" order from some lawyer, claiming that Major League Baseball owned the rules to baseball and I was in copyright violation. How they found out about an obscure FTP site, I'll never know. What got me was not that they claimed I was violating copyright on the edition of the rules, which I probably was. They claimed they owned the game of baseball. How they could assert something so patently absurd -- if there was copyright exertable, it surely died no more than twenty-seven years after the Knickerbockers first wrote it all down in 1845 -- is beyond me. The radio has long been one of baseball's best forms of advertising. The lure of the game over a broadcast is a common memory for most of us. You get hooked for life on a baseball habit. But, if you'll pardon the druggie reference, Baseball is no longer interested in giving away the first one free. I doubt anybody but an already-converted fan, and one uninterested in the local team which she or he can hear in hi-fi on their modern AM radio, will bother ponying up even $9.95. There's an old adage in the internet business (if that's not an oxymoron -- all things are relative) that there are only two prices for anything sold on-line. Free, and not free. And making something not free will scare off 99% of the customers. It's real simple. Free Internet broadcasts are tbe best form of advertising (and can be advertising-funded, anyway, since the audio's the same as actual advertising-funded radio broadcasts) MLB could hope for. It's not like AM radio listenership of games is on a major upward arc. MLB's conversion from hatred of digital media to attempting to extort a buck from it while being blind to the long-term uses of the internet is emblematic of the generally myopic vision of the Lords who run the game. They need to focus on the big picture: making baseball fans and keeping them happy. I don't know of any real baseball fan who'd prefer listening to the game on the internet if they had the alternative of watching it on TV or going to the ballpark, where the real money is. I do know of a lot who won't get quite as excited now that they're no longer getting their on-line versions for free. Come to think of it, that sock puppet did look a little bit like Bud Selig. |
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He Said It, Not Me"If there is a hell, it's a small room in which one is trapped for eternity with both of these men." - former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, on Don Fehr and Bud Selig Recent Articles The Seventh Inning Stretch: If the Lords of Baseball really want to liven up the pace of the game, here's a simple solution: shorten games to seven innings. [read it] The Crank Explains Off-Season It's the story...of a boy named Nomo... Why Mike Hampton is So Fly Mike Hampton's Balls are So Big and Heavy, of course they'll sink in Colorado The Medium Near Past Clemens' Conniption 2000 Tenth Player Awards Much Valueless Pablum 2000 Team by Team MVPs Olympian Hypocrisy Wild about the Wildcard Leaving Las Vegas Forty Man Fraud The Fashions in Shelbyville The Corked Bat President L'Affair Rocker and the Presidency The Fragile Ecology of Cape Cod Baseball Let's Go to Work
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