You've Let Me Sing, Mr. Angelos, Please Let Me Watch!

This message is actually directed at John P. Angelos, the Executive VP of the Baltimore Orioles.  I suppose that his dad, Peter, who bought the team 25 years ago but is much less hands-on as he approaches 90, may read it as well, and that would be fine too.  So here goes.

"Dear Mr. Angelos,

I know it has been a hard year and all as far as the Orioles have been concerned, losing all those games and it being unclear as to how and when things may get better.  But people still actually want to watch the team, and that is especially true for those no longer living in the area.

My family and I went to many, many games, both at old Memorial Stadium and the beautiful Camden Yards, while living up there for 36 years and while the kids grew up, but I've been "reassigned" and now work and reside in the coastal area of the Carolinas.  I truly miss your ballpark, though, for several reasons.

One is that you invited me on numerous occasions to sing the National Anthem there.  

Of course, there was the one episode in Memorial Stadium where I was lip-syncing and you played the tape of a barbershop quartet while it was just me out on the field, but your predecessor owners apologized, and after you bought the team you brought me back often to sing live.  I really enjoyed the experience, and hope I did the Orioles and our country proud.

I was also privileged to have presented Cal Ripken with the Lou Gehrig Award of the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity there at Camden Yards, another great Orioles moment I was proud to have played a part in.

And for many years I watched a lot of Orioles games on TV, including on MASN, the sports network you own, for many, many years.  We had MASN in our home then, through our TV service, being in the metropolitan area and all.

Unfortunately, though, that has ended, and I hope you can fix it.

Baseball, as you know so well, has an arcane TV blackout system where every zip code in the USA is assigned to one or more teams.  Fans are automatically blacked out of broadcasts of games from those teams in our zip code, unless you watch them on the regional carrier for that team, such as MASN -- assuming your TV service even carries it.

So even though we live 465 miles south of Baltimore, we are somehow assigned to the Orioles as our "local" team for TV purposes.  That means that we get to see no Orioles games at all, ever.

Why is that?  Because we are so far from Baltimore that neither of the two available cable services here carries MASN.  Our cable service is actually locally-based.  We selected them so that our service calls would be answered by Americans, 15 miles away, not in Mumbai, where they don't understand blackout rules quite as well.

Being a small service, they only have about 150 of their total customers who subscribe to the Extra Innings package to see all the unblacked-out games.  We know -- we are one of them.  In fact, we called the cable company to ask them to add MASN to their lineup.  Since they are a local company with good service, they actually talked with me about it and their experience with you.

Want to know what they said?

We'd love to add MASN, they said.  There are a lot of people who live here who are from the area up there who have asked.  But when they contacted MASN, you quoted them a non-negotiable price that was so high that no one would pay for it, and they certainly couldn't afford to add it to their basic package cost without losing half their subscribers.

So I am blacked out of your games.  I don't get to see your team.  And I now understand that the reason I can't see your team is because you can't, or won't, charge an affordable price to our tiny rural cable company.  And we can't use a satellite service, because this area is severely windy and dishes routinely move and blow away to where they can't provide the associated Internet service reliably enough to make work possible.

You let me sing at your games, Mr. Angelos, but now you won't let me see them.  But you could.  

How about contacting me, and I'll provide you the contact information for our cable company.  As a favor, you could negotiate a truly affordable rate for MASN instead of the non-starter that MASN's previous quotes have been.  My contact information is below.

In fact, while you're at it, perhaps you can also persuade your colleagues among the owners to revisit the blackout rules to reflect the reality of today's cable and satellite world, and not the world of 1953 that they are still based on.  

I will be more than happy to participate as a member of the committee, or to testify on your behalf for reasonable changes to the rules.  I can handle the English language pretty well.

I'd like to see the Orioles, really soon."

Kindest regards,
Bob

Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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