YES Network Sacrifices Fans In Cable Battle

Given their quality of play over the last week, the Yankees should be glad their devoted fans in Westchester and Long Island can’t see them on television. Right now, YES, a network formed to show Yankee games and earn the team swimming pools full of cash, is locked in a battle with the area’s largest cable provider, Cablevision. The issue at hand: whether or not Cablevision should be offering the network to its users.

YES wants to be on Cablevision’s basic plan for a price of $2 per subscriber. What this means is an increase in cable rates for every subscriber, not just Yankee fans. Cablevision wants to make YES a premium channel like Cinemax. The company has said it would provide a channel on its system and let YES set the prices and collect all of the revenues.

This is not good enough for YES. Its chairman Leo Hindery was quoted in the New York Times on Tuesday as advocating, "Liberty, Justice and Yankees on Basic for All!"

That’s a relief. I’m glad we can stop pursuing happiness. Given the oppressive heat, the job market, and Detroit Tigers 1-11 start, happiness was becoming a foreign concept. Yankees on basic would be easier, though I would need to buy a television and get cable. It’s more likely I’ll just stick with following sports the old-fashioned way, listening on the radio, reading in the newspapers, and watching the totally sweet Internet gamecast system at majorleaguebaseball.com.

Many years ago my favorite team, the Detroit Red Wings, experimented with the idea of putting some games on pay-per-view in the city. I remember some writers saying that this was the beginning of the end of sports on over-the-air television. Games had already gotten onto cable and this was the next step—we would all have to pay to watch games on television. I don’t know what ever happened to that plan. I assume it was not profitable enough to try and put more games on pay-per-view.

When it comes to televised sports, I’m not in a position to distinguish between right and wrong. Everyone is out to make money and that’s fine—business is all about money. Today, the New York Yankees happen to be at the peak of their abilities as a franchise, having won four World Series since 1996. But one day, they will return to the old days—read: the 1980s—when Yankees launched home runs into empty seats. If they think they can consolidate the money, go for it.

But I have a big problem with Hindery’s rhetoric. To suggest the Yankees are right, as his quote and many of the radio commercials have said, is a joke. If anything, the offseason proved that baseball doesn’t want to be the people’s game. After Sept. 11 baseball was everything we needed it to be: reliable, constant, and electrifying. It gave us the best World Series in a decade. But two days after the best World Series in a decade, its commissioner started talking contraction.

Let’s be clear here: YES was a good idea thought up by smart businessmen who saw a way to make money. But these same money men may have overestimated demand for the Yankees. Only Cablevision and DISH Network do not carry the channel; they believe the majority of their subscribers do not want it. They are probably right. Baseball fans are a minority.

But to accept Cablevision’s offer of a premium channel for Yankee games is to take a step down the road toward pay-per-view. It will reach the point where fans at home will have to buy a ticket just like those who take the train out to the stadium. And that will be the beginning of the end of sports as we know it. I believe that there is a point where short-term profit will lead to the decay of the sports market.

Every game that is not on over-the-air television is a game that does not reach the fullest possible audience. That audience includes future fans.

That includes kids like me who didn't have cable until the age of 10, but managed to get hooked on sports through games on high-numbered channels and newspaper articles.

Games start and end too late. Even the NFL, the last bastion of afternoon sports, wants to push playoff games deep into the night. These complaints have been aired a million times, and with television ratings down, the games have become marginalized. In 20 years, the $2 a subscriber that YES wanted will probably look like a gross overpayment.

YES and Cablevision have conspired together to take the Yankees away from their fans. Eventually, when they come to a compromise, everyone will make a lot of money. And everyone will lose, too.