Batter up

Getting Braves games not easy this year

A writer on the weekday sports newsfeed I follow wrote earlier this week:

Three weeks until Opening Day. I can already taste the hot dog, hear the organ and smell the fresh grass.

Indeed. We will get through March Madness, then baseball season will be upon us. In fact, there are a few days of overlap.

For my wife Susan and me, we will resume watching the Atlanta Braves on Bally Sports, although we had a bit of a scare where that is concerned.

About six months ago, we changed our television service to YouTube TV. It was a big deal for us to become cord cutters, but it was time.

For years we had been AT&T U-verse customers, which was mostly satisfactory. But some years ago, AT&T stopped offering U-verse to new customers, and over time their support of existing customers — for us, anyway — became less than optimal.

We had one of their boxes go kaput, only to be replaced with a refurbished one, and then another refurbished one, neither of which would work. The cost of U-verse was also going up.

A technician finally confessed to us it would probably get no better. He said not to quote him, and I’m not because I don’t know his name, but he said if he were in our place, he would consider YouTube TV.

We took his advice, and we did more than consider it. We did not renew our contract with AT&T and subscribed to YouTube TV at about half the cost of what we were paying for U-verse.

We have never looked back. It has taken some adjusting, such as learning to navigate with no channel numbers, but overall, it has been fine.

We knew when we did it, however, that when baseball season rolled around, we would either have to kick our habit of watching the Braves a few nights per week, or figure something out. YouTube does not carry Bally Sports, the entity that broadcasts Braves games.

A few weeks ago, Susan said it was time to start figuring it out. She started doing her research.

To abandon YouTube TV and go with one of the cable providers would have nearly doubled our cost and there would be a contract. We had no desire to return to that model.

Another streaming service that carried Bally would have cost about the same as what we had been paying for U-verse and also required a contract.

Braves games on the MLB network would be blacked out in our area. (I don’t have the energy to explain why. Just trust me.)

We learned that Amazon had bought a minority stake of Bally Sports as part of Bally’s bankruptcy proceedings, and there was (and still is) some speculation Amazon will offer Bally Sports packages via its Amazon Prime channel.

In fact, in January when news broke of the Amazon-Bally transaction, that offering appeared to be all but certain. Today, however, it’s crickets on that front.

We agreed we did not want to go back to cable and get into a contract or double our cost with the other streaming service that also would require a contract. So, if this meant no Braves, it meant no Braves. Susan had a pretty sad look in her eye when we ended that conversation.

But she is nothing if not tenacious, which is why it did not come as a total surprise when she presented a solution a couple of weeks ago.

There is another streaming service called fubo (no capital F, which drives me crazy, but nothing I can do about it) and their lineup includes Bally Sports. The cost is comparable to YouTube TV and there is no contract. They offer a 30-day free trial.

Their overall channel offering is not as robust as YouTube TV, so we are not inclined to switch to it on a permanent basis. However, with the first month free, we are willing to subscribe for baseball season, April through September and we keep YouTube TV. With fubo being month to month, we cancel at the end of September. If the Braves are in post-season, other networks will carry those games.

And it gets better. We can add up to three other users to our fubo subscription for a few dollars per user, per month. So, Susan proposed to our son David in Birmingham and our son-in-law Ben in Huntsville, also Braves fans facing the same dilemma, that they be our additional users, and we split three ways the entire cost of fubo for the months we have it.

They are in, and that’s our plan.

Perhaps by next season we will be able to get Bally through Prime. Or, even better, maybe YouTube TV will pick it up.

This saga is part of the very complex system of watching sports these days, with the networks and streaming services all vying for a piece of the pie, and the cable providers (the ones left) hanging on for dear life.

It’s enough to make a guy want to turn it all off and watch Hallmark movies — or something.

Unless he is, like me, fortunate enough to have a spouse who does not give up easily.

So — for now, at least — play ball.