King Kaufman's Sports Daily

MLB's exclusive deal with DirecTV: Just the latest "screw you" to the game's best fans. Plus: A Pro Bowl item!

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Feb. 9, 2007 | You've heard by now of the nearly done deal in which Major League Baseball will sell its Extra Innings package exclusively to DirecTV's 15 million subscribers for $700 million over seven years.

The package, which allows fans anywhere to watch up to 60 out-of-town game broadcasts a week, has been available for five years on DirecTV, on the Dish Network and on cable systems. About 75 million customers had access to it.

This must be a big deal because politicians are grandstanding about it.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., has written a letter to the Federal Communications Commission asking for an investigation. Sen Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who has been a critic of the NFL's similar exclusive deal with DirecTV, told the New York Times, "I've asked my antitrust people to do research to confirm my preliminary judgment that it's an antitrust violation. But I don't think I'll be able to stop it."

Yes, it's very difficult to stop Major League Baseball from doing what it wants to do on antitrust grounds because MLB is exempt from antitrust laws, thanks to a 1922 Supreme Court decision that, nonsensically, declared baseball isn't interstate commerce. Congress has chosen to do nothing about that ruling in the 85 years since except a 1998 act limiting the antitrust exemption in labor matters.

Extra Innings customers who can't or don't want to sign up for DirecTV are squawking, though as the hardest of hardcore fans, people willing to pay $179 a year for the right to watch a dozen or so baseball games every day, they should know this is pretty standard behavior for baseball.

That is:

Dear best customers,

Screw you.

Love,
MLB

That's because baseball, like most sports entities, knows it's not going to lose its best fans. There's almost nothing baseball can throw at its most dedicated customers that will make them go away. A decade of Fox being the national broadcast TV network is all the evidence we need to back up that assertion.

As Joe Sheehan of Baseball Prospectus wrote last month in an insightful piece reluctantly defending the deal, "You simply don't go from being such a big fan of baseball that you would purchase 1,200 games a year on satellite to a non-fan based on one decision."

Next page: What MLB gets out of the deal. Plus: The Shawn Merriman rule?