The Pastime

According to The New York Times, who are rarely wrong about such things, Major League Baseball signed an exclusive deal with DirecTV to become the new home for MLB: Extra Innings.

There was a rumor last week of this happening, and I hoped it wouldn’t come to pass.

Extra Innings has been available to 75 million cable households and the two satellite services, DirecTV and the Dish Network. But the new agreement will take it off cable and Dish because DirecTV has agreed to pay $700 million over seven years, according to three executives briefed on the details of the contract but not authorized to speak about them publicly.

At least there’s some good news. According to the article, we’re going to see a 24-hour baseball channel beginning in 2009. It will be similar to the NFL Network, I’d assume.

Major League Baseball is close to announcing a deal that will place its Extra Innings package of out-of-market games exclusively on DirecTV, which will also become the only carrier of a long-planned 24-hour baseball channel.

…

The baseball channel is scheduled to start in 2009.

So now I need to make a decision for next year. I can either switch from cable to DirecTV, which would be a hassle and not entirely feasible, or go with the MLB.tv option. The Extra Innings package is more expensive, but it’s far better quality and I can use my DVR to record the games. MLB.tv is cheaper, and I can watch games on any computer, but I’d have to watch the games on a computer. I spend enough time as it is online.

It’s going to be a tough decision for me, and countless other baseball fans.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 3:13 am and is filed under General Baseball, Rumors, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.