Shifting Extra Innings package to DirecTV? MLB whiffs again

But the difference here is as large as a steroid-addled offensive lineman: Football fans don't have to choose between watching their home team's games and an out-of-town television package, as fans in Philadelphia and San Diego will.

And, most of the NFL's biggest games wind up on national television anyway. The baseball schedule is so different that you can't even compare the two.

What alternative is there for those across the country who don't want to watch the Yankees-Red Sox for the 140th time on national television?

And now that ESPN is no longer televising midweek doubleheaders, teams that play in the west rarely make national television appearances. The only way to see them, for many passionate and/or displaced fans, is by subscribing to Extra Innings.

The whole thing is reminiscent of how baseball's internal debates must have gone back in the 1920s when baseball was first on the radio, when some clubs didn't want to broadcast all of their games for fear that it would hurt attendance.

To the contrary, it actually helped sell the game and boost attendance -- as did television a couple of decades later. The current thinking is so backward it's almost forward.

I'll resist the temptation to expound on baseball's history of a lack of forward thinking here.

A history that, until this Extra Innings outrage, Selig and Co. have been doing an admirable job of changing.