Baseball fans return, but some are missing games at home

Once upon a time, the only way to actually see your favorite Major League Baseball team was to go to the stadium and purchase a ticket.

Long before MLB had an app for your phone and television stations were broadcast — for free — over the airways, fans could only listen to the radio or go to the game.

For me, and maybe you, that time is sadly now.

The network that owns the rights to broadcast St. Louis Cardinals games no longer appears on streaming services like Hulu or YouTube TV. Even subscribers of Dish Network are without Cardinals baseball because that service is at odds with the company that owns the network that owns the broadcast rights over how much it is worth.

Even if we paid MLB.tv $129.99 to stream every team’s games live or on demand on our favorite supported devices, it does not include the Cardinals because, as the fine print says, “home television territory blackout restrictions apply regardless of whether a Club is home or away and regardless of whether or not a game is televised in a Club’s home television territory.”

In other words, even if you live in Poplar Bluff it is considered part of the St. Louis Cardinals broadcast rights that MLB sold to be televised. There are ways around this, of course, and one could simply choose a television service that does provide the network with the same name as a casino, but one in which I associate with a fitness club chain from the 1990s.

Granted, one might think that having the ability to view televised sports, especially a team as popular as the Cardinals in these parts, might be a job requirement for the local newspaper’s sports editor. The opposite is actually true.

When the Cardinals won the 2006 World Series, I was covering a rainy football game in Sikeston. And when David Freese hit his walk-off home run in Game 6 of the 2011 World Series, I was driving back from a football game at Seckman.

It’s the same during the spring — Opening Day was spent covering a softball game.

My birthday also happens to be around Opening Day. My 40th birthday was spent at Busch and I bought my first beer when Mark McGwire hit a towering 12th inning homer at Busch II.

I made the trip Wednesday to see the Cardinals play the Washington Nationals on a day that ended up being a lot different than in the past.

First off, only 32% of the stadium’s capacity is being used. That means nobody sits in the row in front or behind you and no seats are used in the middle of the row. After sending a picture of our seats to my brother, who attended a packed Texas Rangers game the previous weekend, he asked why nobody was there.

Unless fans are eating or drinking they are required to wear a face covering, which actually kept me from getting a sun burn (my arms were not as lucky).

It was kind of like watching the Cardinals of the early 1990s when Joe Torre was manager or trips to ballparks of last-place teams. There were plenty of empty seats and the crowd didn’t have that hum to it. No high-fives with strangers after an RBI hit (not that the Cardinals had any), but also no times getting up to let someone out of the row.

There’s also no vendors selling beer or asking if, “anybody wanted a soda and a free straw.” They don’t even have straws anymore (it has a coffee-cup-like lid now). Not every concession stand is open, but the ushers will let you know where the closest one is located.

All transactions are cashless, including the tickets, which are now scanned off a phone app as you enter the gate. There are no bags allowed and the team has a list of all the safety policies on its website.

It’s still too expensive between the tickets, parking, food and extras (got to have a scorecard). So instead of going to 10 to 20 games a year sitting in the cheap seats, we now go once a year and watch the rest on television.

Make that watch the highlights on our phones.