You said it.
And to be clear, it's not even on broadcast TV in the Chicago area. Every regular season Cubs game is, but not the playoffs, unless they make it to the World Series.
Is that some kind of public safety measure? Prevent spikes in self-harm rates?
I have never seen so many Cubs fans in my life, and I grew up in the suburbs. STFU, bandwagon jumpers.
That makes no sense. Why would you follow a team for 100 years of losing when you can get the same emotional pay-off from jumping on a bandwagon at the end? Like somebody who has been rooting for the Cubs in 1945 or whatever has a license to stop you because they had the sads for oh so many years.
A couple of years ago people would say, "You're only watching the Pirates games because they're in the playoffs so everybody is paying attention to them."
Yes. Exactly. Doesn't this seem obviously superior to following them regardless of how bad they suck?
I guess Moby hasn't heard of a little thing called Loyalty.
I maybe don't follow baseball very closely. Last week, I learned that Wrigley Field now has lights. I thought that was supposed to be some kind of fixed tradition.
they're in the playoffs playoff
I just had the disturbing realization that when I see the Cubs' logo I immediately think of Perfect Strangers.
But hope they win. Good for long-suffering fans, and Cleveland's name makes me want to root against them.
It would be better if they called themselves the "Northeast Ohio Indians".
Good for the Cubs. I hope they win it all.
/s/ A Red Sox fan
They're setting off fireworks here in the dankest-in-a-bad-way suburbs, so I gather Sports Team won? Go Sports Team!
Moses Cleaveland would make a much better baseball mascot than Chief Wahoo. I mean, look at that face.
I know. But really why not go for even higher odds? The Cubs only had like a 15-20% chance of winning it all at the beginning of the playoffs. There's gotta be surer thing.
Contra 12, as a Red Sox fan I am happy now no matter who wins the series. I can't root against Francona, but one can't root against the Cubs either. No bad outcome.
For once I'm glad MLB.tv gives you post-season access if you're not in the US. Not a feature I've had much use for in the past.
Meanwhile, there will be riots in State College tonight, so at least Pennsylvania's got that going for it.
The success of a polity should always be measured by the number of riots within it.
Don't forget teo! (Just kidding. I don't follow baseball at all.)
17: No way, man. On one side, long-suffering fans, some watching their last season ever, have a shot at the joy Red Sox fans experienced in 2004. On the other, a team that won't let go of their racist logo. This isn't just a World Series, it's a moral imperative.
My wife's been a huge fan, and has been able to avidly follow the last two years. In fact... due to superstition, I'm off to buy her Cubs World Series gear, since she's convinced that they'll lose if she buys the gear.
Tricky fates, but easily outwitted by loyal fans... or at least husbands who are suckers. ;)
On the original: point about TV she was so very happy when she found a live feed of the game on youtube. (I think.)
She tells me that we'll be off to sports bars this week, since I put my foot down about signing up for cable for a week.
Wait, WS isn't on broadcast this year either? I thought it was just one of the league playoffs that was only on cable.
Divisional & Championship series were on cable only, but the World Series will be on Broadcast: Fox.
About 80-85% of US households have cable (including mostly FS1, which is where the division series was) and of the remainder that have TVs at all there aren't many that are broadcast-only (though broadcast-only households are increasing). Particularly true in big markets like Chicago or LA. Baseball is mostly shown (during the regular season) on various regional sports networks, which in general and show more games than ever before.
There's not really a meaningful lack of access to watching baseball except for (some) internet cord-cutters who aren't willing to pay for the MLB app. Plus poor people in Chicago root for the White Sox anyway. In short: internet-weenie bandwagon-fan problems only.
Should say that FS1 had the NL division and NLCS this year.
That assumes the houses with cable all have whatever package gets them the game. Before we canceled cable altogether, we first cut down to a basic package that didn't have ESPN or any sports channels.
FS1 is in about 72% of households and ESPN in about 80%. And you can use Sling or a Playstation to get the channels if you don't want to pay for cable.
I'd forgotten (thankfully) that the NLDS was on TBS, which had next-level atrocious broadcasting. I thought Joe Buck and Smoltz (especially Smoltz) were actually pretty good.
We don't even have a Playstation. Just the Wii and the X Box.
There's not really a meaningful lack of access to watching baseball except for (some) internet cord-cutters who aren't willing to pay for the MLB app. Plus poor people in Chicago root for the White Sox anyway. In short: internet-weenie bandwagon-fan problems only.
The issue is that in the local area it is HARDER to watch the playoff games than the regular season games. Every regular season game was on WGN I believe. Suddenly all these roadblocks are set up to something that has been easy the whole time. This happens at the time that everyone who normally watches only 10% of the games, and sees the Cubs as synonymous with WGN, is making plans to be sure to tune in to these important playoff games.
Also, I had a cable package recently that had sports channels but not TBS. You can also get TBS without sports channels (this is more common).
And you can use Sling or a Playstation to get the channels if you don't want to pay for cable.
I guess young people can figure that out, baseball fans tend to be the opposite these days though.
I guess in most places the regular season games are on a cable channel instead of a local network, but Chicago still has WGN.
And the idea of getting only over-the-air channels is indeed very rare now, but the significance of the over-the-air channels is that those are the ones that EVERYONE gets no matter what sort of cable plan they have.
I think the number of households getting only over-the-air has been increasing.
Why is everyone talking about the Cubs all of a sudden? Did Donald Trump not say something outrageous today?
NMM to Jack Chick. He wouldn't have approved anyway.
The Cubs were on WGN for 40 games, on Ch 50 for 5, and on WLS Ch 7 (ABC) for another 25.
Saw the Sox on a similar spread of channels in the past few seasons.
My BIL got MLB this past year—they used to come to our house for big games—so I'm up on this.
I'll appreciate being able to work on the kitchen, where my wall-mount is broadcast-only during the WS.
There's not really a meaningful lack of access to watching baseball except for (some) internet cord-cutters who aren't willing to pay for the MLB
This is not true thanks to dickhead IP lawyers who wrote blackout terms for the app. If you're in the local market for your team you can't watch your team on the app. Or were you suggesting using proxy servers to get around that?
That's true but that's because most mlb revenue comes from local sports network deals. This is also why the playoffs are on different networks. More broadly it's pretty easy to watch baseball unless you're a cord cutter, and pretty easy even then. Baseball surely has its problems (mostly, the TV audience is old) but there's not a meaningful I-am-priced-out-of-watching-baseball problem.
The one exception to tbis is ironically the Dodgers, where because of a pricing standoff it legitimately can be hard to watch games (I switched from DirecTV because of this). Yet the Dodgers have a young fanbase that's the envy of the MLB, because Mexican-Americans. Irony abounds.
I can attest to the youth of the hordes of Giants fans crushing and squishing me on the train. (I also one day saw a family on BART where the dad was dressed in Giants gear and the mom in Dodgers gear. Everyone else who got on the train stopped to gawk and cheerfully inquire about the health and physical safety of their relationship. They seemed pretty bemused.)
36
As the saying goes, "how do they know?" I'd find it easy to believe that over-the-air ticks up when people cut the cable cord but still want to see some locally broadcast programming (news, regular season local sports teams, Jeopardy*, etc.). An HD antenna is pretty cheap.
The hardest thing about watching the FS1 games was figuring out what channel FS1 is on my cable subscription. Not that it was all that hard, but it was annoying.
* Is Jeopardy available other than from "regular" channels?
I wish we had broadcast television here.
Unless I live in a community property state.
There's not really a meaningful lack of access to watching baseball except for (some) internet cord-cutters who aren't willing to pay for the MLB app.
Expecially true when you consider that last time the Cubs won the World Series, sports broadcasting hadn't been invented.