I’m a huge baseball fan but a few years ago I was pretty frustrated. Even though baseball games are on a lot more often than they were 20 years ago I still rarely got to see my beloved Mets play. Even though the Mets were a big market team, they weren’t very good until last year so they couldn’t get their way onto ESPN very often. I would occasionally get to see the Mets play the Braves on TBS, but that was it. I was not a happy camper that my viewing of the Mets was nothing more than waiting to see their score scroll by on the ticker at the bottom of the ESPN screen.
Then two years ago I finally found the solution, MLB Radio. MLB Radio is a service that you can get from the official Major League Baseball website. MLB Radio will allow you to listen to any game that you desire. You can listen to the big game of the night, the Red Sox vs. Yankees. Or if you’re a Kansas City Royals fan and you’re the one person looking forward to that interleague game against the Pirates then you can listen to that game. MLB Radio doesn’t just cover the regular season either. You can listen to preseason games and postseason games. There are even Spanish feeds if you speak Spanish and there are never any blackouts.
I know it’s not watching the game, like I wanted to before. When I first signed up for MLB Radio I thought I would at least get to follow my team on a more regular basis. Now that I’ve used it though, I like listening to games way more than watching games. The announcers are one hundred times better on the radio especially since my only choices of television announcers are either ESPN’s horrid announcers or the Braves’ most biased announcers on the face of the earth.
Television announcers are lazy. Since everybody is watching what happens they don’t have to do much except come up with something to talk about to pass the time until the game is over, which usually leads to them talking about things other than the game at hand. I can’t count how many times I tried to watch an ESPN game last year and a game that is supposed to be about the Brewers and the Cardinals turned into a discussion about steroids or Alex Rodriguez or whoever was hot at the time.
Radio announcers don’t do anything but talk about the game, that’s all they can talk about because they have to explain to you every thing that is happening. If they go off on a tangent about why Pete Rose should be in the Hall of Fame then the listener doesn’t know what happens that entire inning. The radio announcers are also more informative. When a batter comes up to bat on television the best they can do is say something like “Here is so and so, he’s batting .271”. When a batter comes up to bat on a radio broadcast they usually begin by saying “Here’s so and so, you know I talked to him before the game and he told me he was going to try and do this more often”. The radio announcers always have little anecdotes about players to tell too. They really know their stuff way more than a baseball announcer.
MLB Radio works great too. I’ve used it for two seasons now and I’ve never had a single game not work. I’ve never had a single game lose connection in the middle of the game. You can also listen to whichever broadcast of the game you want. If you want to listen to the Yankees and Tigers game and you think the Yankees’ announcers stink then you can listen to the Tigers’ announcers instead.
MLB Radio isn’t free but hold on before you press the back button on your web browser. MLB Radio isn’t free but it’s very affordable. MLB doesn’t cost 50 dollars or 100 dollars. It doesn’t cost a monthly fee of 19.99 or anything like that. MLB Radio costs $14.95. That’s not $14.95 per month, $14.95 for the entire season. Let’s think about this for a minute. There are 30 teams in baseball and each of them play 162 games, so there are a total of 4860 games in a season. For $14.95 that means each individual game will only cost $0.003, just a fraction of a penny. Now you’re probably not going to listen to every single game because a lot of the games are happening simultaneously. Even if you only watch your favorite team’s 162 games you’re still talking about only paying 9 cents per game. And if you sign up now you get 14 free issues of Sports Illustrated Free! Anyway, before I start sounding anymore like an infomercial, check out MLB Radio if you want to follow your favorite team. I highly recommend it.
