BY JIM LITKE
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
It's a funny business that shuts the doors when customers eager to hand over $179 are still lined up around the block.
But that's baseball for you.
Every time people try to make nice, it pokes a stick in their eye.
Remember contraction? Well, it's back. Only this time, it's fans instead of franchises that baseball is thinking about whacking.
Last season, a half-million of the game's most loyal followers paid $179 to their satellite or cable providers for Major League Baseball's "Extra Innings" package, which entitled subscribers to 60 out-of-market games every week of the season.
Some were New Yorkers retired to condos in Florida who still followed the Mets, others were die-hard Dodger fans resettled in Las Vegas and one, apparently, was a very powerful, very angry Massachusetts resident who works part of the year in Washington, D.C.
Come next season, almost half of them probably won't be back.
In a deal that could be announced soon, Major League Baseball is proposing to put "Extra Innings" exclusively on DirecTV, where a majority of its subscribers, about 270,000, already reside. That leaves the 180,000 customers who bought "Extra Innings" on cable and the 50,000 on satellite rival Dish Network with only a few options:
Switch to DirecTV.
Buy "Extra Inning" from baseball's Web site, mlb.com, for $79 and try to follow games featuring players the size of matchsticks.
Watch reruns.
Or make a federal case out of it, something Sen. John Kerry is threatening to do.
"A Red Sox fan," the Massachusetts Democrat said recently, "ought to be able to watch his team without having to switch to DirecTV."
Or not.
Bloggers have started a brushfire of complaints across the Internet and Kerry has asked Federal Communications Commissioner Chairman Kevin Martin to investigate the proposed deal, which neither party has discussed in public thus far. But neither the grass-roots campaign backed by petitions with a few thousand signatures, nor Kerry, even with support from plenty of people in Congress, is likely to stop the deal.
At this point you might ask yourself why MLB would go to so much trouble to kiss off almost a quarter-million fans, especially since the seven-year, $700-million deal with DirecTV is anywhere between $250 million to $300 million less than it might have secured had "Extra Innings" stayed put.
And you might answer that baseball is always making bad decisions, something that was apparent when it sacrificed half the 1994 season and the entire postseason to a labor dispute, or shifted the World Series games to night so kids wouldn't see them, or even when the late Edward Bennett Williams welcomed former commissioner Peter Ueberroth to his first owners meeting with the greeting, "Welcome to the den of the village idiots."
But this time, commissioner Bud Selig & Co. think they're onto something. Though a consortium of cable companies offered similar money, DirecTV sealed the deal by promising to save a spot in its basic programming tier for a 24/7 channel MLB plans to launch by 2009. The cable companies were willing to offer the baseball network as a premium on the sports tier, meaning people who wanted it would have to pay extra.
Nobody knows whether baseball has outsmarted itself yet again, but there's more than the 230,000 fans at stake. Assume the deal with to DirecTV gets done, the MLB channel launches in 2009 and the demand for baseball, including out-of-market games, ramps up. Then what?
Instead of the 75 million homes that could have ordered "Extra Innings" through cable, Dish Network and DirecTV, only the 15 million on DirecTV will even have the option. So we'll spare the people at MLB headquarters the usual headaches coming up with a slogan for the rollout on the new ad campaign.
"Baseball: Love it and leave it."
