Colorado Rockies news and links for Friday, November 8, 2024
When I first started playing Little League, the players were given an assignment by our coach. He told us to find a great player who played our position and watch them. I played second base and already familiar with Ryne Sandberg because the Cubs were on WGN, so I picked Sandberg. The assignment fueled my love for the Cubs and I got to watch a Hall of Fame second baseman on a regular basis. Watching baseball was easy and fun.
In 1993, the Rockies came and I had two teams. It was double the baseball to watch and I could do it all because my parents had cable. The Rockies were on Channel 2 for their first five seasons. You didn’t have to pay for extra sports packages or sign on for season or monthly subscriptions to watch the team you shared a home with. Basic cable, antennae or premium cable, you could watch baseball on a daily basis in the season.
Sure cable had its problems – that comes with any market where only a few corporations hold all the power and can hike up prices and exploit customers. But it wasn’t as much work to watch local sports.
Enter streaming
Fast forward to the cable-cutting revolution and more options entered the market. With streaming, households could pick a few platforms and pay for content they wanted without all the extra stuff you didn’t want or ever watch. The price-gauging cable companies finally lost their power.
A few years later, is it really any better? Are people saving more money than they used to in order to watch what they want at home? Maybe some. But not for others and it comes at another cost.
Purple Row’s Renee Dechert wrote about many of the pros and cons of Rockies.TV in October. With MLB.TV, aka Rockies.TV, more out-of-town Rockies fans can watch and the Rockies eliminated local blackouts for streaming their games in 2024, which helped more dedicated fans watch. But what about casual fans, could-be fans, or lower-income fans?
A few years ago, I got DirecTV to be able to continue to watch the Nuggets, Avalanche and Rockies, even as most cut the cord. As more and more streaming platforms entered the game, I subscribed to more and more to be able to watch shows and movies you can’t get anywhere else, while maintaining my satellite dish so I could still watch my home sports teams. Having to add more subscriptions has made it all more expensive and made it more work.
According to a Forbes article from August, Americans pay for 2.9 subscription services a month on average. At the same time, 45% of Americans canceled a streaming service in the last year because costs were too high. With wages not rising as fast as the cost of living in a lot of places, it’s entirely possible that the streaming cutback will continue.
After struggling for years, streaming services are turning big profits ($2.15 billion in the last quarterly earnings report from Netflix alone, according to Forbes) by hiking up prices, limiting or prohibiting password sharing and by running more ads. As more streaming options for sports and other entertainment content grow, especially with certain programming only offered through one company, it sure does seem to be much like the cable options of the past. Once people look at their budget and add up the total for streaming – TV, movies, music, gaming, and sports – it calculates to a big chunk of change.
At $19.99 a month or $99 for the year, are the Rockies worth a big piece of your streaming budget? At $99 for a 100-loss season, do the Rockies make the cut of ways you want to spend money?
Even more, would you keep watching if the Rockies decided to tighten their financial belts because they were no longer getting the $57 million they got from selling their rights to AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain?
In addition to the utter ridiculousness of the Rockies cutting their payroll after making fans put in more effort to watch a worse product on the field, I think the streaming revolution leaves behind less digitally savvy and fixed-income fans, like older fans that could be a lot of viewers. By catering to only those who sign up for the package, the Rockies, and other baseball teams, are leaving behind less wealthy fans and eliminating the possibility of the casual fan who might stumble upon a Rockies game on their screen. This is where MLB is making a mistake.
MLB vs. NFL/NBA/NHL
Just look at the NFL. Whether you have no-cost rabbit-ears antennae or a screaming service with basic local news (CBS, NBC, and FOX), you can always watch your local team. It’s always been on those channels, making it easy to access for all tax brackets. It’s possible football would be the top-watch sport on TV without that, but there’s no way that decades of easy access hasn’t helped build up a diverse and large NFL fanbase.
After being greedy and stubborn for years in its feud with Comcast and not seeming to care if fans could watch the Nuggets or Avalanche, Kroenke and Sports Entertainment finally made a fan-friendly plan to ease access to watching the two teams prior to the 2024 season. In addition to Altitude’s channel on DirecTV, Fubo, and Spectrum TV, fans can now pay the same $19.99 a month to watch.
There are two big differences from the Rockies, however, as fans get both Nuggets and Avalanche games for the same prices as the Rockies (even though the game totals are similar at a combined 164 games vs. 162 baseball games), they also announced a deal with local 9News and My20 to broadcast 20 Nuggets games and 20 Avs games this season on basic cable. That’s nearly a quarter of each team’s games, which would be equivalent to about 40 Rockies games.
So folks with local news – either from an antenna, basic cable, or from steaming like Hulu Live or YouTube TV with local news channels – people could watch 40 Altitude games. This option not only makes more people be able to watch for less, but also increases the chance that the casual fan or possible future fan could stumble upon Avs or Nuggets content while channel surfing. This may not be a huge portion of the fanbase and media revenue, but it’s an important one for the sustainability and future of sports fandom.
The future
As streaming content continues to flood the market, and as the costs keep rising, the market will become saturated, if it’s not already. More and more people will shrink their steaming budgets and have to decide which few to keep.
As the Rockies decide to shrink their payroll and suffer from bad decisions like the massive Kris Bryant deal, they’ll need people to make an investment in a failing organization that refuses to innovate to keep being a fan – despite the front office’s inability to budget wisely and build a competitive roster.
Without changes to make it easier to watch Rockies games for more people, the media revenue will continue to shrink. For every fan that decides to tune out, another possible future fan never watches because they don’t have a subscription to something they don’t know they might like. It’s a slippery slope that could further reduce an already hurting and diminished fanbase.
If the Rockies keep blaming the fans for not watching when they gave them no reason to, it’s hard to imagine an end to the spiral – even if you have a great outdoor bar that acts like a ballpark and hotel and market across the street that makes more money than many other MLB teams. It’s not a sustainable model.
The Rockies need a model like the Kroenke’s to try to get the casual fan back and perhaps generate some income. After all, it takes money to make money. If the Rockies made it easier to watch, allowed more access to different folks and were a better baseball team, the viewership will come. But if the Rockies blame bad viewership for making the team worse, it will be hard to retain audiences if they don’t improve in 2025.
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Patrick Lyons looks ahead to next year’s draft, speculating what could be if the Rockies were to finally earn the No. 1 pick in the MLB Draft. With the Draft Lottery, the Rockies have a 22.45% chance of getting the first selection after finishing as the second-worst team in the league. The Rockies have never had the No. 1 pick before. If it happens, it could not only land the organization a possible generational talent, but it could also be the son of Rockie great Matt Holliday.
These 3 Rox could have Gold in their sights | MLB.com
On the heels of Ezequiel Tovar and Brenton Doyle winning Gold Gloves, Thomas Harding looks at what other Rockies might have fielding awards in their futures.
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Arizona Fall League
Peoria Javelinas 10, Salt River Rafters 3
Gabriel Hughes struggled with control in his start on Thursday night as the Rockies first-round Draft pick from 2022 gave up three walks and one hit and was charged with three Peiora runs in 1 2⁄3 of an inning. The Rafters hit a three-run homer in the top of the first to take a 3-0 lead that was erased by the second inning. Fellow Rockies prospect McCade Brown pitched a scoreless eight with one walk and one hit, but no more damage. Skyler Messinger recorded one hit and walked once for the Rafters, while Ryan Ritter also drew a walk.
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