Why Isn't Anyone Blaming Selig and Goodell?

For the past five days and counting, over three million people in the greater Philadelphia and New York regions (and, um, that would include me) have been held hostage by Fox / Cablevision Armageddon, where the broadcast network and the cable company have been in a seemingly endless battle over retransmission rights. (And if you want to know who is in the wrong, it's pretty clear that it's Fox, but rooting for Cablevision is like rooting for the Mets; they be less odious than the Yankees, but you are still rooting for the Mets, which is to say an overpriced failure with tinges of outright moral depravity. And when you pay Cablevision, you pay the people who own the Knicks. So if either party was on fire, and I had to take a piss? No sale. Moving on.)

Anyhoo... more or less taking a PR pass on this mess has been NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, aka the most powerful man in American sports, and MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, aka the most loathed man in American sports. And both of them have, rather than taken any action, let this Russian roulette routine go on, costing their leagues revenue in the short and potentially long term, and making fans of their leagues wonder just who, exactly, has their best interests at heart. (Answer: No one.) And if you think that just because you don't use Cablevision, you aren't affected, or that if you just bite the bullet and switch to satellite, everything will be fine... well, wrong. Fox sees this as a revenue channel that needs to be created in a down economy, and due to the remarkably poor PR of cable and satellite providers, they are going to go after this with aggression. Today, Cablevision; tomorrow, very likely, your system. (And yes, I'm sure that Fox has cause for some revenue from this channel, in that I'm sure that bedbugs and other loathsome parasites have some cause for existence. But it's not exactly a position you need to defend, unless you're getting paid by the Bedbug Lobby.)

The timing of this is, of course, directly related to the calendar. There is no time of the year that Fox's viewers are more in thrall to their offerings; it's the start of the new season (I have to have my "Glee", because I don't get enough "High School Musical" -- and yes, that would be sarcasm) and the games that baseball and football fans want to see the most. Had this gone down in, say, August, the only thing that would have happened is that you'd have more people cutting off their cable for a Web-only play, the way that a third of under-35 Netflix users already have done. And if there's one thing that sports fans and "Glee" devotees can agree on, it's this: being used as a bargaining chip is more or less intolerable.

It could, of course, end tomorrow with one simple decision by Selig and Goodell. They could allow for a free broadcast on their Web properties of the affected games, and eliminate the cable and broadcast middle-men. This would, of course, prompt threats of lawsuits from Fox, but more importantly, it would help to end the impasse with Cablevision, and perhaps persuade Fox to undergo the binding arbitration hearings that appear to be the only way out of things. (As to why Fox hasn't accepted arbitration, it's simple: they'd lose, and set a precedent for losing when they try this nonsense in other parts of this company.)

And in the long term, especially if they can promise a broadcast with limited commercial interruption? Both leagues could get more for their product, control the "news" coverage of their leagues to an even more Orwellian degree (no more of those hard-hitting journalist stories from the purveyors of Fairly Hyped and Balanced Hyped), and ensure that their fans -- particularly the younger ones who get hooked on playoff baseball in ways that last a lifetime -- don't miss the games that matter the most.

So, Bud? Do something popular and right for the fans, for once in your miserable life. Put the game on your site, and let Fox's lawyers be hanged.

And Roger, isn't this a better thing for people to be talking about your league than, say, concussions and/or the advent of contact-free football?