Friday night’s MLB slate featured a pair of Apple TV+ exclusives with the Milwaukee Brewers hosting the Chicago Cubs and the Pittsburgh Pirates hosting the San Diego Padres. In both cases, the streams of the game left a lot to be desired.
At roughly the same time, viewers of both games began to complain of glitches, both visual and audio, in the broadcast.
Glitches happen. It’s annoying, but things like that are going to happen on occasion. That said, this is a particularly bad problem — for a couple of reasons.
One, sports fans in general are already leery of the increase in streaming services needed to watch their teams — to a point where the matter will soon be discussed in the United States Senate. Whether that produces any meaningful results remains to be seen (and as a word to the wise, we’ll encourage you not to hold your breath), but it points to a level of frustration. Having technical issues with games that are exclusively available on a streaming service is only going to raise that frustration.
Two, baseball fans tend to be particularly loyal to their local announcers. This is particularly true here, as fans ranked three of these four announce crews (Padres, Cubs and Brewers) in the top 10 of MLB announcer rankings in 2024. So, when they’re watching a game when those announcers are taken away from them, they’re already frustrated.
When the broadcast they watch also doesn’t work, the anger is only going to grow.
About Michael Dixon
About Michael:
-- Writer/editor for thecomeback.com and awfulannouncing.com.
-- Bay Area born and raised, currently living in the Indianapolis area.
-- Twitter:
@mfdixon1985 (personal).
@michaeldixonsports (work).
-- Email: mdixon@thecomeback.com
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