The blackout hole

53% of baseball fans, when asked what single improvement would mean the most to MLB, picked the same answer: eliminate TV blackouts. Not cheaper tickets, which came in second. Not lower concession prices. Not a salary cap — which happens to be the centerpiece of the league's current CBA proposal. It's the most readable data point of the baseball year.

Why this is the worst: If you live within a team's defined "home market," you're blacked out from watching that team on the MLB.TV streaming service. The only way you can watch is to pay for the regional sports network that carries that team’s games. This is a legacy framework designed in the early 2000s to protect local broadcast deals. It has not kept pace with anything that has happened in media since then. The cord-cutting numbers keep going up, many of the RSNs the structure was designed to protect no longer exist, and yet the blackout remains — a turnstile that keeps out the casual fan who might just want to watch a Tuesday afternoon game on their phone. Even worse, now games are broadcast on Netflix and Apple, which are two more subscriptions you might need in order to watch all of your team’s games.

What MLB cares about: MLB's opening CBA proposal calls for a hard salary cap of $245.3 million, a hard floor, and a 50/50 revenue split on television income. These are real structural questions about the game's long-term competitive health. But the fan-survey result exposes something the league's posture tends to obscure: the most urgent gap in baseball's relationship with its audience isn't competitive balance. It's access to watching the game. Whether the Royals and Athletics can theoretically compete with the Dodgers matters a lot less than whether a kid in Kansas City can watch the Royals play on Friday night without a $150 cable bundle.

The growth tax: The whole premise of building new baseball fans is that the game sells itself — get someone in front of a walk-off, show them a breakdown, let them hear the sound of a pitch painting the corner. What the blackout system does is put friction between the casual viewer and that first moment of conversion. Casual fans don't push through friction. They just don't watch. The people who navigate MLB.TV workarounds are already fans. You can't grow the audience you need for the next 30 years through a system that turns new ones away first.

The 53%: The league has a rare opening in CBA negotiations to treat broadcast access as a bargaining priority — not just competitive balance, but the ability to watch. Whether that happens is a different question. But the survey data makes the mandate clear. More than half the people who love this game most want, above everything else, to simply be allowed to watch it.