Sports on the Radio is Still Free…Maybe

July 19, 2016

I just got my cable bill and noticed the ever-increasing charges for watching my local sports teams. As the tickets of the live events increase and fewer people attend, fans can turn to the television to catch almost every ballgame. This is where the cable and satellite providers nail you. They hook you on their sports package, and your wallet is what they want to keep you digging into. Sure, it's still cheaper than going to a game, but when your bill climbs to $150 a month, you might need to take a hard look at what you are getting.

For instance, I subscribe to the satellite sports package in my household, and my overall tab is running $140 a month. My bill includes some movie channels, but most importantly, I watch my local teams viewed in High Definition. I pay extra for the HD viewing as well. Once you notice the clarity, you can never look at the standard definition again. Some local teams play as much as fifty miles from my house and are not feasible to attend during the week. I have the luxury of watching all games on the big screen, in a lazy boy chair with a cup holder.

Where is all of this leading to? Television contracts are driving up the revenue for pro sports, which means players are being paid more. When players are compensated more, the cost for seats rises in price, TV contracts rise, cable and satellite cost too, and the cycle keeps repeating itself over and over. The days of getting a free game on your TV are almost extinct unless you own a nifty pair of rabbit ears (you know the antenna prongs you can set up in your house), or you are sporting an old aerial antenna on your rooftop. This eliminates 99% of sports fans who are paying for the cable/dish robbery.

How do we get around paying the ransom? Well, you have a few choices which are not perfect but do offer some solace. The radio is still free last time I checked. Unless you add gasoline in the car or the electricity or battery, it needs to run one. You can go to a friend's house and bribe him with beer and snacks to let you view a game. You can go to a sports bar, order a coke and eat the complimentary pretzels and hopefully, you are not thrown out. Hmmm, this is not as easy as I thought. The only other way to check out a free game is to go to a store that has a big-screen television and ask them to turn on a ballgame for you while you sit on one of those comfy couches.

On a serious note, be prepared to keep digging deeper into your wallet to see all sporting events unless you are willing only to take in pickup basketball games at the park. When you think about it, your property taxes are paying for the upkeep of that park, and those are only going up too. It comes down to how much you are willing to pay and how important this is to you. I see the cost as a luxury to receive sporting events in my living room while sitting in my big recliner looking at the 55" screen. It hasn't reached the point for me to cancel the sports channel, but there may come a time when I turn to my transistor radio and putter around in the garage as my dad did. This was gratifying to him to have the ballgame on while he was multitasking. He was multitasking before the word was invented, and all because he loved his sports.