With the first days of April warmth come also baseball’s opening day, a rite of passage for the season that is spring, and a capitalist orgy of ticket sales, merchandising and television rights.
The business side of baseball is a busy behemoth that reaches every facet of the game, and has recently struck New York Yankees’ fans at Fairfield University particularly hard.
Recently, the Yankees launched their own television channel, the YES Network, and have decided to broadcast their games over this channel. Previously, most of their games were aired by MSG, with some being shown on network television. MSG is owned by Cablevision. Cablevision is the company where Charles F. Dolan, the man whose $25 million gift to this university got his name on the school of business, made most of his fortune.
Cablevision (and Dolan, presumably) were logically upset when the Yankees decided to launch their own network, and have subsequently refused to add the YES Network to their cable system lineups, a move which has resulted in Yankee diehards deserting Cablevision in droves for satellite systems on which the YES Network is available.
But students here at Fairfield don’t have the options of a normal television consumer. Our channel lineup, provided by Cablevision, has an impressive list of good channels, but unfortunately for Yankees fans does not include the YES Network. This fact has produced a lot of consternation on the part of Fairfield Yankees fans, who now cannot see television coverage of nearly the amount of games televised by MSG in the past.
As a Mets fan, I take a quasi-sadistic pleasure in the agony of Yankees fans, and this incident is really no exception. Something tells me that Red Sox fans here feel the same way. After listening to the crass, unabated, mindnumbing braggadocio of Yankees fans for as long as I can remember, this whole drama is, to me, high comedy.
But the fact that miserable Yankees fans are funny to me is no surprise and a little beside the point. The real matter here is greed and pride. The greed of George Steinbrenner and his bildebergeresque actions in pursuing nothing more than the almighty dollar in his ownership of the Yankees, combined with the pride of Dolan and Cablevision in stubbornly refusing to add the YES Network to their lineups, have all left the little man behind. The average Yankee fan is the ultimate loser in this multi-million dollar pecuniary tug-of-war.
But is that really any surprise? All sports, not only baseball, are now more of a business than they ever were before, the pressure of the dollar placed above the fans desires.
So perhaps Cablevision will cave and begin carrying the YES Network, or maybe some Cablevision channels will get rights to some Yanks games this year. In this whole sordid story, one thing is for sure: nothing, not even America’s pasttime, comes without a price.
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