It’s not enough to merely subscribe to DirectTV’s MLB Extra Innings package. The real, unrepentant, degenerage out-of-market Red Sox fan will stump up an additional $12 a month for DirectTV’s “Sports Pak”, with the reasonable expectation that doing so will bring Dennis Eckersley’s mustache and other highlights of NESN’s Red Sox coverage into your home. Lori of Two Cents & A Schilling learned it’s a little more complicated than that.
We™re asking NESN to take our money and give us programming they have already produced. We™re willing to pay to watch Tina Cervasio fail to ask the obvious post-game questions, to watch Jim Rice (above, left) struggle to speak in complete sentences, to watch the NESN staff suck up to the Globe reporters as though they™re actually œinsiders, and to watch those incessant Philadelphia (œit™s like a baby New York) commercials.
If they™re going to expend such an enormous amount of effort selling pink hats and Varitek t-shirts to Mrs. Johnny Bandwagon, you™d think they™d realize they™re just playing with fire by preventing real fans from having access to the minimal programming necessary to ensure we remain educated and involved consumers.
Information deprivation. Taxation without representation. Second class citizens.
Red Sox Nation, my ass.
I imagine somewhere in the rural midwest some NYC expatriate is fuming over not being able to watch one of the 9 (9!!!) YES commentators hired to try and make every single routine fly ball caught by Melky Cabrera seem like Willie Mays’ famous catch. The only one of those motherfuckers that doesn’t send me into a fit of rage is Jim Kaat (the anti-Tim McCarver). Imagine my smoldering anger at having to see a Red Sox game covered by these infantile jackasses. I’m starting to think Michael Kay hits the sauce before every game, especially when he’ll call a slow pitch breaking pitch that goes from 12-6 a ‘fastball.’ God, was it a relief to watch the series against the Mets on SNY. After getting over the feeling that Beaver Cleaver was doing color commentary (alas, it was Ron Darling!) I settled in really nice with their announcing team.