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Sure Wish We Could Watch MAC Baseball Games

I'll preface this with a possibility: this could very well be a case of a selfish individual — who received more than enough this season — wanting more.

It can't be said enough that the MAC did a bang-up job of providing free live webstreams of football and men's/women's basketball games, provided they (a) weren't on ESPN or another exclusive-rights channel and (b) were played at a MAC facility. And they did this without additional advertising or even registration. Theoretically the advertisements came in the form of the radio feed was synced up with the video.

This helped me cover the sports with a better understanding this year. Not to mention I enjoyed the games more as a fan. Many of us are ill-equipped to go to every, if any, MAC game given our busy schedules, but we'd like to see them all. Big Ten fans get every game on TV it seems, and the Horizon League seemed to pull off free-on-the-Internet basketball. And I still was able to make it out to four basketball games this year — five if you count this sad trip to Oakland. Of course, I could ask for full archived games or DVR functionality ... maybe in due time.

But here's the pressing thing. A couple souls in our collective are going to be bringing some MAC baseball coverage because they're able bodies who are already going to the games. Myself, however ... well, I'd love to watch them and I've seen one or two games possibly streamed. I spoke with the MAC a month or two ago and they said the schools own the right to broadcast baseball and softball games so if I wanted to pony up the bucks for all the individual athletic packages I could, but that's a hell of a business expense just to watch one non-revenue sport.

And I'm not saying this is an injustice. Maybe it's perfectly warranted. Perhaps the radio isn't sufficient to match up with every game. But it makes the sport hard to cover from a conference perspective.

Otherwise ... hey I could just look at box scores and say "ooh, isn't that something!"