I'm not going to give you all the details about what station on what day the Cubs are going to be on. You can go just about any where else an find that out if you are so interested.
What I am going to do is complain...because, well, I like complaining.
As most of you know, I live in Wisconsin. I've lived up here for 15 years now which seems unbelievable because I'm fairly sure I just moved here a couple months ago. I've wanted to move back to Chicago for a long time, and never intended this to become my permanent home. And, in fact, the yearning to move back to the Chicago area has really started to peak over the last few month ever since my grandmother died and we had a mini-family reunion for the funeral.
Sorry, I got sidetracked there. I am fortunate enough to get Chicago Comcast SportsNet on my DirecTV service up here in the Madison area. I get to watch Bulls games, Hawks games, Chicago Tribune Live...and all the other programming on that channel, except Cubs games.
Due to the MLB blackout policy, people in the Madison area are only allowed to watch Brewers games, so DirecTV has to blackout the Cubs and White Sox games.
The blackout rules are ridiculous. My parents who live almost 80 miles due west of me actually get the Cubs' Comcast games, which makes even less sense.
Here is the map of the blackout regions.
For years the owners have said that they intend to remedy this issue, but they never do. The reasons for the policy in the first place are basically to allow teams to protect their markets from the intrusion of other teams. Well, this is an old an archaic set of thoughts. Baseball is the only sport that limits its fans from seeing its product in this way. Baseball should be trying to get as many of its games to as many people in as many possible ways as they can!
It irks me more this year as it appears that the Cubs will only be on WGN (which, for some reason, doesn't get blacked out) a total of 60 times.
I hope that the Ricketts's can help push the owners forward on reforming this system.
In the mean time, I'll shell out the hundreds of dollars and get MLB.tv.
