Major League Baseball Blackout Map

On Sunday I mentioned the fact that, thanks to arcane blackout rules, I'm prohibited from watching games from four teams (the Phillies, Pirates, Nationals, and Orioles) on the Extra Innings package. A commenter asked me if there was a map showing all the blackout areas, and there is. Dan werr at Baseball Think Factory put one together, and it was referenced in two fine articles Jeff Passan wrote last summer:


Click map for large version

As you can see, a four-team blackout like we face here in central PA isn't that unusual -- I count ten different chunks of the country with the same number of blacked out teams, including the entire states of Oklahoma and Arkansas. And it's even worse in a couple of places, like:

* The southern half of Nevada, which is blacked out from six teams: all five California teams (Oakland, San Francisco, LA, Anaheim, and San Diego) plus the Arizona Diamondbacks. It looks like parts of the Las Vegas area are included in this blackout.

* The entire state of Iowa, where it is impossible to watch Cubs, White Sox, Royals, Brewers, Twins, or Cardinals games.

Some of these restrictions are beyond ridiculous. Thanks to Yahoo Maps, for example, I can tell you that the good people of Hammond, Montana are unable to watch Mariners games, despite living 1,013 miles from Seattle. That's an extreme, of course, but when you look at that map there are tons of things that jump out as wrong.

I think the main thing comes down to this -- all over the country, people are being deprived of the ability to watch out-of-market games that they don't have any other way of seeing. I understand the theory behind, say, blacking out Phillies games in the Philadelphia area. You don't want the MLB package taking viewers away from over-the-air or Comcast Sports Net games. But how does Major League Baseball justify blacking out Pirates games here in Harrisburg, where we cannot get any Pittsburgh OTA stations or FSN Pittsburgh? That's just one of literally scores of examples of games being blacked out and that blackout serving no purpose other than preventing fans from watching games.

The whole idea of putting the games on TV is to build fan loyalty, right? The more games we see, the more hats and pennants and replica jerseys we'll buy. So why make it harder for people to see the teams they want to see? The more Mariners fans there are in Hammond, or Reds fans in Tupelo, or Rangers fans in New Orleans, or Orioles fans in Charlotte, the better for baseball, I would think, but obviously the smart folks who run MLB think otherwise.