I did something today for the first time ever. I watched baseball on Fox Sports 1. Evidently Fox Sports 1 has been covering baseball all season, but you'd never know it. And I'm not sure that's exactly what FOX wanted when they decided to do that.
FOX is in the first year of a new contract with Major League Baseball, and in that new contract they made some changes. Last year, there was a FOX game every Saturday afternoon. This year there isn't. In fact, the only games that have actually been on FOX this year were the All-Star Game and those couple Saturday night games they have right before the break. Since the All-Star break has come and gone, so has baseball on FOX. If you blinked, you missed it.
Instead, the Saturday afternoon games have been on Fox Sports 1. I think. The reason I don't actually know is because those games aren't exclusive. So, for example, the Yankees-Red Sox game at Fenway Park on Saturday afternoon will obviously be a national game. That means it'll be on Fox Sports 1. Except people in New York and New England won't watch it on Fox Sports 1. That's because it's also on YES and NESN. If given the choice, fans will watch their team's game on their team's network with their team's announcers over a national broadcast. So, since fans will be given that choice, FOX is giving up millions of potential eyeballs because its coverage isn't exclusive.
That's an incredible mistake on FOX's part. They're trying to build Fox Sports 1. I get that. But this isn't the way to do it. So far, the only event Fox Sports 1 has had exclusively that people made it a point to watch was the Big East Men's Basketball Tournament. Some playoff games will be on Fox Sports 1, too, so that'll obviously be a big draw, but I have a feeling for many people trying to find Fox Sports 1 to watch the baseball playoffs will be just like trying to find truTV to watch the NCAA Tournament. And it'll be just as confusing, too.
My solution isn't for FOX to stop putting games on Fox Sports 1. It's their network and their rights, so they can do whatever they want. The better option, though, seems to be fairly obvious. Make all of the games exclusive, whether they're on FOX or Fox Sports 1. That's the only way you'll get people in the habit of watching Fox Sports 1. And it won't seem so random when a game is on that way, either.
Take the Sunday night game. While I'm not the biggest fan of the Sunday night game (mainly because when the Yankees play in it, I have nothing to do during the day, then at the end of the season, it's on at the same time as the Sunday night football game), I at least know that it's on ESPN every week. The ESPN Sunday night game has become an accepted part of the baseball-watching routine. But would you believe it's the only exclusive national telecast of any baseball game in a given week?
When FOX shows games on the broadcast network, they are in an exclusive window. Since FOX games are regional, however many games FOX is showing (usually three) are the only ones allowed to start within that window. Until they started with the Saturday night thing, they did 4:00, meaning that if you weren't on FOX, you had to start at 1, 7 or 10.
While I'm not sure, I think that's still the case, which could be why Yankees-Blue Jays was the only 1:00 game in the Majors last Saturday (which is wrong on so many levels). But again, I don't know. Because it just seems like a regular game when you can also watch it on your regular channel. I will give FOX this, though. They have Saturday doubleheaders on Fox Sports 1, and I think they've done away with splitting the broadcasts regionally. But with two games, that obviously means other games are going on at the same time as the Fox Sports 1 games that are on the teams' local networks.
Maybe this soft launch strategy is only for this first year or two. The rationale might be that since not everybody gets Fox Sports 1 yet, this way they can still see the game. When Fox Sports 1 gets greater distribution, FOX might make the move back to its telecasts being exclusive, whether they're on the broadcast network or the cable network. And maybe FOX will figure out that more people watch baseball than the other crap they've been showing on Saturdays and start showing baseball again.
In the early 90s, CBS had the MLB TV contract. Except very few people knew it. Because it seemed like the only things CBS was interested in showing were the All-Star Game and World Series, with an occasional regular season game mixed in. FOX paid an awful lot to renew its contract with Major League Baseball, but in year 1 of the new deal, it more closely resembles the CBS coverage in the early 90s than their own coverage of recent years. That shouldn't be the case.
What I'm saying probably sounds a little weird. I'm not saying that I think there should be more national broadcasts or even that I'd prefer to watch them over a team broadcast (which obviously isn't the case). What I'm saying is that I think FOX is missing an opportunity here. The only exclusive games on Fox Sports 1 are on random Tuesday nights in July. Not the Saturday afternoon games that are the bread-and-butter of the package. It seems backwards.
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