Blacked Out

As the dog days of summer have hit, so have some of the slowest times of the sports calendar.  With basketball and hockey gone for the year, and football not yet started, the only thing we have left in terms of major team sports is baseball.  This is fine by me as I enjoy baseball, especially the Cardinals.  Every night there is a Cardinals game I tune in to Fox Sports Midwest, a channel that carries Cardinals games and a channel that I typically get on my TV.  This all changes once the game actually starts, however, when the channel goes black and I am greeted with a lovely message stating "This game is restricted in your viewing area."  This absolutely infuriates me and is one of my largest annoyances with sports, even more so than ESPN.

Living in metropolitan Indianapolis, there are three teams closer to me than St. Louis: (1) Cincinnati, (2) Chicago White Sox, and (3) Chicago Cubs.  I have access to all of these games via Fox Sports Ohio or various Chicago stations.  Additionally, if I lived in Terre Haute (a city closer to St. Louis than Indianapolis), or southern Indiana towards Illinois, Fox Sports Midwest would not be blacked out.  In a desperate attempt to understand this logic, I've done quite a bit of research regarding MLB's black out rules.  You can read a brief summary of the rules on Wikipedia, or a more in-depth summary on baseball's FAQ site.

Baseball's blackout rules differ from the NFL in that they have nothing to do with attendance or really even where you live.  The country is divided into arbitrary regions belonging to each team, and within that region you are restricted to viewing the team's local broadcast.  Since Indianapolis is so close to Chicago and Cincinnati, and does not have it's own team, I believe the regions of the two Chicago teams and the Reds overlap where I live, which is why I am able to view those games.  Since we are outside of St. Louis' region, the game is blacked out.  No one wins in this situation.  I don't get to see the Cardinals play and the St. Louis-area advertisers miss out on viewers.  And it's not like I'm going to start watching the Cubs just because baseball makes me watch them.  The only way for me to get Cardinals games is if I pay for MLB Extra Innings or MLB.tv, which I would be willing to do if I lived far away from St. Louis.  The fact that I get the channel and baseball forces the blackout is just infuriating beyond relief.  For another example that is even more extreme, if you live in the US territory of Guam, you are not allowed to watch San Francisco Giants games.  These rules make such little sense they are currently in the process of coming under attack in a class-action lawsuit.  Until that suit finishes (and hopefully in my favor), I will either have to pay to watch the Cards play or stare at my black screen.