So, it's not a question of them not giving me something. It's a question of them TAKING AWAY SOMETHING I DID HAVE. Something I liked alot. Something I paid a lot of money for. These are two completely different situations.
It's not good business to tell good customers to take a hike. Why is it good business over the long term to make your product available to only 15 million people when it had been available to almost 100 million previously?
The NHL has done something similarly stupid. They signed a deal with the Outdoor Life Network, now called Versus. I am a hockey fan, and I can't tell you what channel Versus is on. They got more money from Versus than ESPN offered, but their audience is minuscule and people are forgetting about hockey.
Baseball is losing the younger generation because they insist upon putting playoff games on way past the bedtime of anyone East of the Mississippi. Now they're taking out-of-market games away from people who've been supporting them for years.
And, AS WE HAVE SAID, they have a right to do it. But that doesn't mean it's a smart thing to do. Obviously, you are either not a baseball fan, or you don't root for a team outside of where you live. For those of us who fit into one of those 2 categories, this is going to be a very sad summer.
I followed baseball religiously up until the strike about a decade ago. The players set a date, as the date approached, they realized they had screwed up in setting the date and if they played one more week, they'd get a whole months salary where as they wouldn't get paid that last months salary with the original strike date.
In that one last week Randy Johnson threw a no-hitter and I think a 2-hitter. That combined with another couple good pitching performance from other players caused my fantasy baseball team to drop from 1st to 2nd place overall as I lost ratio on 10,000s of a percentage point. Suffice it to say that when the difference in winnings from first to second was almost $2,500, I was pissed as all heck.
From that day forward I vowed never to watch/follow or care about BB until every player that struck was out of the game. I sumped my fantasy teams and my stratomatic team that I had for over a decade also. I will never return to baseball ever, period. I only read about BB when they have strife. I will not go to a game with free tickets. I will not watch it on TV, ever. If BB is screwing over very loyal fans like yourself, my attitude is great, I hate BB. Nothing personal against you btw.
As a side note. Hockey shot itself in the foot because it, like baseball, believed their stupid records were more impotant than the game itself. At least the hockey owners were smart enough to realize that the whole season had to be killed to prevent the players union from pulling the same b.s. the baseball players union pulled when they struck near the end of the season in order to cancel the World Series.
If any owner other than Marge Schott had proposed they use replacement players and finish the season, the owners might have pulled their head out of their arses and had a World Series that year.