TV worth watching: there’s always a good game on MLB.TV
BY DALE KOVAR
HJ General Manager
For a long time, I was in the camp of refusing to pay
for TV.
At our rural home, cable was not an option. That left the
satellite services, which seemed pretty expensive.
My perception was compounded by an occasional ho-
tel stay where there would be several dozen channels, and
we would zip through them, fi nding only commercials and
very little that was worth watching anyway.
So we made do with the free over-the-air broadcasts.
Netfl ix fi nally convinced us to pay for television service
with a price that was closer to $10 than $100 per month.
We enjoyed the choice of programming and learned how
to binge-watch.
Then last summer I stumbled across a temporary but
very attractive offer to try MLB.TV (Major League Base-
ball) for about half the season.
As a sports fan, especially baseball, they got me, and
I’m back this year.
MLB.TV includes every baseball game except home-
team games (Twins here) and certain games that are
broadcast nationally on another network.
The service also includes the AtBat phone app, which
allows me to look up numerous other details such as the
live boxscore of a game or which other teams a player pre-
viously played for.
All games are available on-demand – even blacked out
games a couple hours after they fi nish – or you can jump to
a specifi c inning to see a rally or unusual play.
The whole package developed me into a league fan in-
stead of a Twins fan.
So with MLB.TV, I can go ballpark-hopping across the
country from Pittsburgh to Washington to Atlanta to Hous-
ton to Boston to Cincinnati to Denver to Seattle to . . .
Often, I watch just an inning or two of a certain match-
up, and then move onward. Or if one game gets lop-sided,
there’s usually another close one to switch to.
It’s especially interesting to be able to catch the fi nal at-
bat of several close games as they wind down. On a good
night, you might see two walk-offs and a foiled no-hitter.
In some ways, it’s more enjoyable to watch a game be-
tween two good teams and not have a rooting interest, than
being disappointed when the local team loses.
Baseball sometimes gets a bad rap for being too slow
with little action, but even hopping around, it’s surprising
how many great plays or key moments you come across.
The nerd in me did the math on how much baseball
there is to watch, so please indulge me for a bit.
Rounded off, the average length of a MLB game is three
hours (actually about 2:52). On a day with a full schedule
of 15 games, that means it would take roughly 45 hours to
watch each one from start to fi nish