***Official 2024 STL Cardinals Thread ***

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Marcellus

I've never in my life had a problem accessing Cards games until FSMW got parceled off.

RSN were available on all cable and satellite platforms (before there even was streaming) since I started watching the Cards in 1995 or 96'. Most cable packages it was standard programming back in the day.

What I don't understand is how Bally or Sinclair or whoever owns the rights to the team's games doesn't seem to understand that accessibility is how they make money rather than continually feuding with service providers. And yes MLB seemed to get blindsided by it.

Hopefully in the end MLB takes the nonsense over and you can start getting your teams channels independently.

Yeah, being in KC, I didn't have Cardinals games until I went to Kirksville for college in 2000. So I don't really know when those RSNs really got up to speed. But yeah, mid-90s feels about right.

Prior to those, it was a wasteland for finding out of market games. I searched the box scores on the KC Star for results and read the 'local prospects' tracker when they had it in there. That's how I managed to know about Pujols earlier than most; being a Maple Woods kid, the Star tracked his performance. I knew his name well before I knew how the hell to pronounce it.

I think Sinclair did it on purpose. They were actively seeking to destroy the 'bundle' model so they could lean into a stand-alone streaming service or even a PPV model. And they just did a god-awful job with it. And badly underestimated how savvy fans would be. I don't think they expected that the fans would come to hate THEM rather than MLB. And that's exactly what happened.

Anyone that might bother to learn how to get a streaming service directly from Sinclair also learned that Sinclair essentially blew up an existing model that they really liked. So they gave them the bird.

Nothing else would explain why they blew a working model apart as thoroughly and rapidly as they did.