On Monday, I watched the Tampa Bay Rays clinch their place in the World Series. The broadcast was entirely in French.
Now, part of the fault of this lies directly with me, I’ll admit. I am in fact, a Canadian. During the regular season, I watch all my games—those available to be watched—on MLB TV, a service which has steadily become less and less worth the $120 Canadian a season I pay for it. The postseason is not carried on MLB TV. For the two postseasons before this, I made the same mistake each year: I went to the SportsNet website directly to sign up for an account for October. I then subsequently realized I couldn’t use that same account if I wanted to sign into SportsNet through Prime Video. So for two years in a row, I paid twice for the same service.
Eager not to make the same mistake this season, I pulled up the game on my TV through Prime and selected the paid feed option. I was delighted to see the price had gone down, but didn’t know why it was telling me my subscription would be through “RSN.” It is worth noting that up to this point, every single step of the process had been in English. I finalized my new subscription and turned on the game, only to discover that the entire broadcast, commercials included, was all in French. No subtitle options, no language change options, no ability to switch my audio feed.
I know enough French that this was not devastating or worth the effort of cancelling only to find an alternate feed for SportsNet, but the frustration remained. Because of the way MLB allows regional broadcast restrictions—in the case of Canada, we cannot watch a single Blue Jays game through MLB TV, they are exclusively available through Rogers—my ability to properly watch the postseason in my preferred language was made unnecessarily difficult.
In 2026, MLB aired exclusive games on multiple streaming services, including Apple TV+, Peacock, and Netflix. In the case of Netflix, they had exclusive rights to the Opening Night game—the first game of the 2026 season—and events like the Home Run Derby and the Field of Dreams game. Peacock, meanwhile, had rights to Sunday Night Baseball, the draft, the Future’s Game, and more importantly, every single game of the 2026 Wild Card series. Apple TV+ had exclusive access to two Friday night games each week.
In addition to this, many teams debuted their own regional networks this season after leaving behind Bally Sports/FanDuel sports and other traditional RSNs. This meant that for many fans, they now had to subscribe to a local regional network package in order to watch their team play. With all these packages, and MLB TV factored in, a baseball fan in 2026 might need to spend over $100 a month just to watch baseball. And if they want to watch the All-Star Game or the rest of the postseason? Well, too bad, hope you still have cable.
For years, I have bemoaned the lack of MLB foresight when it comes to making their most exciting product available to the widest possible audience. The MLB All-Star Game each July plays host to the biggest names and hottest talent in baseball, and for a sport that has been having trouble getting and maintaining a young viewership of new fans, this seems like a gross oversight. The game is not broadcast on any streaming services, but it’s also not available on MLB TV, so for those who have cut out cable, there is no way to watch the biggest exhibition game of the year. Moving this game to YouTube, where it would be freely accessible to anyone who wanted to watch it, would create not only plenty of ad revenue for MLB, but would also make it easy for new fans to find and participate in. MLB even attempted an arrangement with YouTube in 2019 with the MLB Game of the Week Live on YouTube, where select regular season games were broadcast on the online platform. This program lasted through the 2022 season, but was not renewed in 2023, as MLB explored new options.
Herein lies the problem with MLB’s current model. There is no one place anyone can go to watch their team play a whole season of baseball. Once upon a time, MLB TV allowed for an optional postseason package for international viewers, allowing them to live watch all the postseason games, but that has since been dropped. Canadian fans who don’t watch the Blue Jays are not able to watch their chosen teams play if they happen to be up against the Toronto club. That’s a whole country blackout, arguably the largest geographical blackout for restricted viewing. But even for American viewers, unless someone wants to keep cable, and then subscribe to an additional 3-6 streaming packages, there will be games during the season that are simply unviewable.
And that’s because MLB doesn’t care if fans can watch the games. We’re just in an ongoing game of chicken to see how far fans can be pushed.
MLB is, at the end of the day, the stomping ground of billionaires who are mostly concerned with fattening their bottom line. They want localized sports networks, they want Netflix money, they will accept any and every streaming offer if it means a sweet shared payday when everything is said and done. Under the current administration of baseball, we’ve seen a vast number of changes made to quicken the pace of games, making them more watchable, hoping to hold fan retention in an era of increasingly shortened attention spans. We’ve seen pitch timers, ghost runners in extra innings, the ABS challenge, the elimination of actually throwing pitches for an intentional walk. All of these things were introduced, ostensibly, to create a more consumable product.
But MLB does not seem to care if you actually get to consume their product, because they have already cashed their checks. With each MLB TV subscription, even if it doesn’t include all the games of the season, they have made their money. When we tune into the Home Run Derby because hey, we already have Netflix, they already have their money. When we sign up for Peacock to watch the Wild Card games and forget to cancel it for several months, they have made their money. Meanwhile, we’re now on to finding a service on which to watch FOX and TBS, if you don’t already have them, in order to see the rest of the playoffs.
In a sport where we already talk about players as if they were commodities to be bought, sold, and traded, we are, in a sense, complicit in our own downfall. We have accepted that we are consumers being fed a product that moves ever further from the original sport into a packaged television program, and like all industries, those with the money and power and control are seeing just how far they can push us before we refuse. Before the fans say No, I won’t subscribe to seven different channels to watch my team lose.
We haven’t hit that point yet, and MLB knows it.
But we should have hit that point a long time ago, when something we paid $120 a year for stopped being enough. When we couldn’t watch an entire season all in one place, we should have drawn a line. Because MLB has created a monster. Fans will now be treated to an incredibly irritating CBA dispute while getting squeezed for every dollar just to consume the product.
And even in saying all of that, even in feeling a sense of fury and frustration over how ridiculous the enterprise has become, I still paid $25 to watch eight baseball games.
In French.