Sometimes these articles are a little sad. Although baseball season is over for another year, there’s no denying the Los Angeles Dodgers had a good run. Or maybe you can deny it, if you never saw a game in the regular season. Sadly, SportsNet LA, the station that exclusively carries Dodgers home games, has never been available on DIRECTV or most other providers. Blame high prices — the owners of SportsNet LA (originally Time Warner Cable and now Charter Spectrum) have historically charged such high prices and demanded such total coverage that a large company couldn’t afford to pay them. Carrying the Dodgers channels could cost in the tens of millions of dollars per year and I don’t care who you are that’s not chump change.
The sad thing is when I was looking back three years for a subject for this article, I saw this one, which I wrote over 3 1/2 years ago. I was hoping that the City of Los Angeles, one of the country’s largest municipalities, could broker a deal between two of its largest companies. Both DIRECTV and (at the time) Time Warner Cable have huge ties to Southern California and yet the city would not intervene for the benefit of 15 million area residents. Oh well, I suppose they had bigger fish to fry.
I wonder if I’ll be writing another bitter “Throwback Thursday” article in 2020 after yet another four years of not seeing the Dodgers.
