The Times Union reports that the New York Mets will not be heard this season in upstate New York. Met fans that can not pick up WCBS 880 AM can either get a subscription to MLB radio for about $20 for the season or subscribe to SiriusXM which carries the games. The article indicates that Entercom could not come to an agreement with the upstate stations that carried the games last season.
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New York Mets will not be radio in upstate New York
- Thread starter BruceNYC
- Start date
My understanding was that radio broadcasts through MLB At-Bat were free.
https://www.mlb.com/apps/atbat states that a subscription to radio only is $19.99 per season or $2.99/month. MLB.TV subscribers can get radio broadcasts for free.
Hard to believe that Entercom 'couldn't come to an agreement' with every one of a dozen stations.
Or that they believe the former listeners to the local stations, in a fanatic display of allegiance, are going to invest in better radios so they can hear WCBS 880 in what amounts to a DXing frenzy.
Gotta be more to it that that.
* * * * * *
Beer buddy across the street from my former house occasionally would get chased out of his den by the wife for drinking a beer during the Star Spangled Banner and every half inning of a televised Phillies game. Once a month or so, he'd knock on my door, a 36-pack of Miller in tow, and listen to the Phillies games off my GE Superadio II, off WPHT 1210. We'd have casual fun when his Phillies were playing my Mets.
He got to be quite the DXer after a while, turning and tilting the radio for better reception and listening to the word-painting.
Crack. 'Oh, THAT one's hit!'
Point is, the reception was *there to hear* because he knew I have good radios. I honestly doubt, though, that the vast majority of Upstate NY listeners is going to race to eBay to buy a GE Superadio II or a Hammarlund HQ-180
Or that they believe the former listeners to the local stations, in a fanatic display of allegiance, are going to invest in better radios so they can hear WCBS 880 in what amounts to a DXing frenzy.
Gotta be more to it that that.
* * * * * *
Beer buddy across the street from my former house occasionally would get chased out of his den by the wife for drinking a beer during the Star Spangled Banner and every half inning of a televised Phillies game. Once a month or so, he'd knock on my door, a 36-pack of Miller in tow, and listen to the Phillies games off my GE Superadio II, off WPHT 1210. We'd have casual fun when his Phillies were playing my Mets.
He got to be quite the DXer after a while, turning and tilting the radio for better reception and listening to the word-painting.
Crack. 'Oh, THAT one's hit!'
Point is, the reception was *there to hear* because he knew I have good radios. I honestly doubt, though, that the vast majority of Upstate NY listeners is going to race to eBay to buy a GE Superadio II or a Hammarlund HQ-180
This near-elimination of the network is very strange. Maybe the non-metro stations couldn't interest enough local advertisers, while the network advertisers were more than willing to blow off the hinterlands so long as their ads were reaching ears in NYC and environs.
The Mets' big problem is once you get out of Brooklyn, Queens and Nassau County, the rest of New York is solidly Yankees territory. With all game on TV, plus satellite radio and streaming, I'd imagine the actual number of listeners to Mets games on the affiliates is minuscule, especially since most locations in NY have a Yankees affiliate with a listenable signal as well.
That is correct. I've seen more than one poster refer to the "free" radio via MLB, but it's never been completely free to all.
I will offer as a former upstate resident that I never knew anyone (at least among permanent residents) who was a Mets fan. Of course the Yankees at one time had a minor league team in Syracuse (for which I believe Bob Costas once did play by play). And for some reason there are some Red Sox fans in parts of the upstate.
Those would be the Syracuse Chiefs, and Costas did play-by-play for them while he was a student at Syracuse University. The Chiefs -- who became the Sky Chiefs when the Blue Jays became their parent club in the late '70s, then became the Chiefs again when Washington took over the affiliation -- were bought outright after last season by the Mets, who promptly ditched the established nickname and rebranded the club the Syracuse Mets. Now the Mets own their top farm club, but by pulling their own broadcasts out of Syracuse and Oswego, they have hurt their attempts to change that area into Mets country, however unlikely that might have been. Neither the Blue Jays nor the Nationals ever had Syracuse radio affiliates, but then they had no financial stake in the Chiefs/Sky Chiefs, who were locally owned.
I recently met someone from Florida who is a diehard Cubs fan. I asked him how that happened. As a kid, he watched WGN. In a similar way, I've known people in areas nowhere near Georgia who are fans of the Atlanta Braves. Ask them why, and they'll tell you that as kids, the only baseball in their area was on WTBS. People will become fans of teams for reasons that have nothing to do with obvious geography. But now that the superstations like WGN, WTBS, and even WOR are going away, these teams may find their fan bases will become more about geography than media. That will likely hurt the teams that were carried by those superstations, and it may hurt the sport in areas that have no pro sports franchises.
There are games on ESPN several nights a week. The geography it favors is big-city East Coast, plus the Cubs and Cardinals. This is sustaining the national Cubs fan base, but because the Braves are not seen as an eyeball-grabber by ESPN's bean counters, the national Braves fan base is shrinking and aging. What you see now is Yankees and Red Sox road games becoming de facto home games in the cities with teams that are either out of contention (Baltimore, Miami) or that have good teams but that ESPN doesn't want to expose because they don't have the "it" factor of the media darlings (Tampa Bay, Seattle). If you watched the 2018 World Series, you probably noticed that the Red Sox had nearly as much support at Dodger Stadium as the Dodgers did. That's not because LA is full of transplanted New Englanders or because tens of thousands of New Englanders were flying to the West Coast just to watch those games. It's because ESPN has done so much for the Red Sox brand over the years that geography doesn't matter as much as it used to when it comes to becoming a Boston fan. This works to the detriment of the Dodgers, who have a history and heroes aplenty of their own, but are stuck on the "wrong coast" to appeal to viewers where the money is.
Actually the Dodgers get on national TV more than some other west coast teams. So do the Giants. But there are teams I've never seen on TV, including the Padres (do they still exist?), the Rockies, and the Diamondbacks. Never seen a game on TV, and I wouldn't know a player's name if you held a gun to my head.
The 'wrong coast' also applies to the Seattle Mariners. Very few games are broadcast nationwide, they have a multi-year contract with Root Sports NW. You have to go back to the Bush administration when they were on OTA TV (KSTW had some games when they were UPN, but the majority were still on then-FSN Northwest.)
There's a reason why some people call ESPN the 'Eastern Seaboard Programming Network', you never see Seattle games on there, not even Sunday night baseball.
There's a reason why some people call ESPN the 'Eastern Seaboard Programming Network', you never see Seattle games on there, not even Sunday night baseball.
Unless they're playing on the east coast, which is the same for the Dodgers and Giants. A lot of it is the time zone.
The Padres signed the second-biggest free agent on the market, Manny Machado, so maybe they'll get a look on the Worldwide Leader in Sports when they come east to play one of the Teams That Matter. The top free agent, of course, was Bryce Harper, who'll probably singlehandedly put the Phillies in more prime time games than they've ever been. This is the celebrity "wow" factor at work. LeBron James and Kevin Durant meant plenty of TV games featuring Cleveland and Oklahoma City over the years, just as the sheer ineptitude of management has kept a high-profile franchise in THE high-profile city -- the New York Knicks -- invisible for more than a decade. But that's the NBA, which has succeeded in developing players as celebrities much more than MLB has.
I sometimes wonder if, at some point, the Yankees and Red Sox make a calamitous series of awful decisions and drop out of contention, their games will still dominate the ESPN schedule.
There was a time when both teams struggled, and there are lots of other teams that are in the eastern time zone that contend. You need a combination of factors: Big stars, winning team, and eastern time zone. Either that, or (as they do in the World Series) you start the west coast games at 5PM. Not easy to do considering LA traffic.
"Upstate" is an interesting term that seems to be most used by citizens of NYC and Long Island to refer to us yokels who live north of West Point or Middletown.
Residents in Syracuse might refer to their part of the state as Central New York. Utica-Rome calls itself the Mohawk Valley, the Adirondacks are often called the North Country, Albany "the Capital District."
The locals call the area west of Rochester "Western New York," occasionally the Niagara Frontier, which is Old School and passé. And as has been noted in this thread, "Upstate" is predominantly dedicated to the Yankees. AAA ball from Syracuse to Rochester to Buffalo was once all about the American League. The National League Mets were once briefly affiliated with the Biffalo Bisons, but it wasn't a good fit for the big club or the minor league affiliate. The best years of the Bisons (then briefly in the American Association) were as an affiliate of the Cleveland Indians.
The Bisons are now back at home in the International League, where they were a legacy member when cities like Montreal and Havana had IL teams. (Jackie Roninson played for Montreal.) Now, as an affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays, a 90 minute drive from Buffalo, baseball fans get to see players on the way up, down and in rehab (Vlad Jr.) for some of the preferred American League teams. Although Buffalo is an "AL town" with historic allegiance to the Yankees, there are some outliers who root for the Red Sox. The Cleveland Indians have some fans too, but Western New York is and always has been about the Yankees.
Residents in Syracuse might refer to their part of the state as Central New York. Utica-Rome calls itself the Mohawk Valley, the Adirondacks are often called the North Country, Albany "the Capital District."
The locals call the area west of Rochester "Western New York," occasionally the Niagara Frontier, which is Old School and passé. And as has been noted in this thread, "Upstate" is predominantly dedicated to the Yankees. AAA ball from Syracuse to Rochester to Buffalo was once all about the American League. The National League Mets were once briefly affiliated with the Biffalo Bisons, but it wasn't a good fit for the big club or the minor league affiliate. The best years of the Bisons (then briefly in the American Association) were as an affiliate of the Cleveland Indians.
The Bisons are now back at home in the International League, where they were a legacy member when cities like Montreal and Havana had IL teams. (Jackie Roninson played for Montreal.) Now, as an affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays, a 90 minute drive from Buffalo, baseball fans get to see players on the way up, down and in rehab (Vlad Jr.) for some of the preferred American League teams. Although Buffalo is an "AL town" with historic allegiance to the Yankees, there are some outliers who root for the Red Sox. The Cleveland Indians have some fans too, but Western New York is and always has been about the Yankees.
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