sillygwailo

I don’t plan on watching much baseball in 2026. I will go to a few games in Toronto, since the general admission tickets are a good price. That said, the game night experience at Rogers Centre, which they’ll eventually rename to Rogers SkyDome, is a nightclub experience more so than ever. The DJ in centre field feels weirdly out of place. In parts of the stadium, people are not even paying attention to the game whatsoever. It's what Rogers—owners of the team, stadium, and TV and radio broadcast "partners"—wants. Anyway, I'll go to a few games. I'm not made of stone.

I might actually be made of stone. But if I can find a place to sit at the stadium and watch the game, I'll enjoy it.

I added Sportsnet to my channel lineup to watch the World Baseball Classic. It has been amazing so far! I had almost decided to go down to Miami or Houston to watch games, and while that would have been fun, watching on TV was the best decision as far as my wallet is concerned. I'll take the channel off my package afterwards, and once the MLB playoffs start, I'll add Sportsnet back and watch as many games as possible.

In November of 2023, I had to cut costs, and the sports TV channels package was a casualty. I plan on adding them for the playoffs, and I still pay for Apple TV+, which is still doing Friday Night Baseball. I may be inclined to watch a game at a pub, if I can get a seat at the bar.

I'll check in with Don't Tell Me the Score, one of the best websites of all time, to watch long summaries of games. Wait, do you not know about Don't Tell Me the Score? They take the summaries made my MLB, the NBA, and the NHL, and put them in an easily consumable format the next day. They're not just 30-second highlight packages, but all of the significant plays for the course of the game. I want that for any live event, sports or otherwise, that's about 3 hours. (Sportsnet, owned by Rogers, and independently of DTMTS, creates a show called Blue Jays in 30, which is 30 minutes [including commercials] of the latest Toronto Blue Jays Game. That's what I really want. Can you imagine an "Oscars in30"?) I have a lot to say about that. That's how I'll watch baseball for the most part in 2026.

I still plan on keeping track of the former (and hopefully current) Toronto Blue Jays in the playoffs on my notes page.

My approaches in previous years:

I don’t plan on watching much baseball in 2025. I will go to a few games in Toronto, since the general admission tickets are a good experience. The Blue Jays now have a fully renovated stadium, having put the finishing touches on the second half of the effort. They have definitely breathed life into attending a Major League Baseball game here, even if maybe it’s more of a nightclub atmosphere than ever. What do I care? They have pinball machines in the stadium. At least they did when I visited last year.

In November of 2023, I had to cut costs, and the sports TV channels package was a casualty. I plan on adding them for the playoffs, and I still pay for Apple TV+, which is still doing Friday Night Baseball. I may be inclined to watch a game at a pub, if I can get a seat at the bar.

I still plan on keeping track of the former (and hopefully current) Toronto Blue Jays in the playoffs on my notes page.

My approaches in previous years:

I don't plan on watching much baseball in 2024. I will go to a few games in Toronto, since the general admission tickets are a good experience. The Blue Jays now have a fully renovated stadium, as they are putting the finishing touches on the second half of the effort. They have definitely breathed life into attending a Major League Baseball game here, even if maybe it's more of a nightclub atmosphere than ever. What do I care? They have pinball machines in the stadium.

In November of last year, I had to cut costs, and the sports TV channels package was a casualty. I plan on adding them for the playoffs, and I still pay for Apple TV+, which is still doing Friday Night Baseball. I may be inclined to watch a game at a pub, if I can get a seat at the bar.

I still plan on keeping track of the former (and hopefully current) Toronto Blue Jays in the playoffs on my notes page.

My approaches in previous years:

I overclocked watching baseball last season, so I'm taking it easy this season. There was a good, cheap package for all Toronto Blue Jays home games in April and, well, that was too much baseball.

This year, I plan on avoiding Twitter during the games I'm not watching (not hard, since it's a defunct social media site anyway), and relying on baseball.theatre for the excellent recaps Major League Baseball produces while not being spoiled by the end score. They are usually over 5 minutes, sometimes up to 12 minutes long, and are just the right size for consuming a full breakdown of a 2 ½ hour event. (There should be recaps like this for every live televised event.) I'm a patron, since the price is right and the added features are right. I'll attend a game in person here and there.

I still plan on keeping track of the former (and hopefully current) Toronto Blue Jays in the playoffs on my notes page.

My approaches in previous years:

I took the pandemic years more or less off from watching baseball.

Tumblr’s content restrictions seem like they’re a lot looser than they were in 2019, so I’m a bit more comfortable posting here again. I might even resurrect a baseball bot of mine, since Twitter's API restrictions around bots seem more reasonable than they did in 2019.

With that, after talking about how I (didn’t) watch baseball in 2020 and 2021, this is how I’m watching baseball in 2022.

During the start of the pandemic, it was hard to get excited about baseball and other sports being played without fans. It really seemed empty in the games I was watching, in both the sense of the stadium and the product on the field. I did watch the 2020 World Series, and caught a game live in Toronto when baseball returned in the summer. I didn’t much like either of the teams in the 2021 World Series, but I still compiled my list of former Toronto Blue Jays in the Playoffs list, and was happy for former Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos. I subscribed to MLB.tv at the very end to watch the 4 games of the season that had playoffs implications, which was a bit exhausting.

For 2022, I’m doing the following:

Not subscribing to MLB.tv. The Blue Jays are exercising their blackout again, which, when they started doing it, meant not being able to watch the Toronto-based team on the streaming service no matter where in Canada.

I’ll watch a few games live at the SkyDome, including my first ever Opening Night, thanks to a ticket package that has me sitting in the outfield 500 section, at a randomly assigned seat, for all of April’s games, for a decent price. If I end up going to 5 games or so this month, it works out to $15 each game. That buys me the privilege of paying an exorbitant amount for beer and footlong hot dogs, which I never seem to mind.

I’m going to watch as many of the Apple TV+ Friday Night Baseball games as possible, at least on as background noise. I made a calendar that people can subscribe to, which I'll update as best I can.

The potential lockout seemed to be awfully damaging if it had gone through, and if it did, it might have signalled the end to watching MLB and finding other baseball to watch. I'm not wild about the National League having a DH, and that's someone who prefers offence to pitching.

I will not change my approach to watching baseball from last year. I’ve by and large stopped being a Blue Jays fan, though I continue to be a baseball fan. I still want an obvious resource for which fans of a team I should follow on Twitter, at least temporarily during a series.