You know the old joke in Chicago- Cubs and White Sox fans do come together…to support the Bears. Well, now Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox fans have a new common antagonist- Major League Baseball, or more specifically, MLB’s television contract. Or you can say the enemy here is NBC Sports; that works too.
Here, as we sit just a few hours from the Chicago Bears hosting this week’s Monday Night Football game, and on the eve of the 2026 MLB Wild Card Series, we cite this Chicago Sun-Times passage, which summated this situation perfectly:
“Games 1 and 2 for the Cubs and Sox were relegated to the network’s streaming service, Peacock, and NBC Sports Network, to which you might not have access…
…To watch Games 1 and 2 of Cubs-Padres and White Sox-Astros, fans must watch on Peacock, which costs $12.99 per month, or NBCSN, which is available on Comcast’s Xfinity system and streamers Fubo and YouTube TV. Though Xfinity and YouTube TV are two of the largest pay-TV providers in the country, NBCSN is missing from services such as DirecTV and Astound/RCN.
Yes, that’s right, welcome to “late stage capitalism,” October baseball style. If you don’t know what Late Stage Capitalism is, it’s basically a euphemism for egregious hyper-monetization, of any product or service, where absolutely no regard is given to the concerns of the consumer.
It’s basically doing whatever makes money and not having any concern at all for customer loyalty.
Welcome to sports in 2026, where all the biggest decisions are made by people who are not fans of any team. The only thing these people believe in, other than revenue streams, is “they’re sports fans, they’re so loyal that they will pay, and do what we want.”
Take the old cliche of “you didn’t play, what do you know?” and ramp it up to “not only did you not ever play, you don’t even care about the sport.”
Private equity ruins everything it touches and when investment bankers are calling the shots, fans get the shaft. What makes this so egregiously offensive isn’t simply just the fact that the games are relegated to add-on subscription services; it’s that it isn’t available over the air in the local market.
As the CST points out:
“These aren’t the first major postseason games stuck on a streamer. The NFL put the Packers-Bears playoff game in January on Prime Video, but it was available locally over the air.”
Exactly! It is perfectly understandable why New York Yankees vs Boston Red Sox gets the primo slot on the big NBC channel that everyone gets. It is to baseball what North Carolina-Duke is to college basketball.
Of course, we already get enough (more than enough) Yankees-Red Sox and Duke-Carolina in our lives as it is, but that’s another story for another time.
Most of the country lives on the eastern seaboard, all the media companies are headquartered out there and our nation actually began in that part of the country.
East coast bias is just an unfortunate reality that we all must accept.
However there is something about Peacock that makes it more detestable than the other streamers. While no streaming service is your friend, Peacock seems to be more of an evil genius when it comes to what content they place on it; especially so with their premium version.
They know what you need/want, and they’ll make you go and pay for it, seemingly more so than the others. Or maybe Peacock seems worse because they were a little later to the party than the others, and by that point we were fatigued enough already.
We all reached the “another thing we have to buy and create an account for? Seriously?!”
It also doesn’t help that when Peacock was born, NBC made a “30 Rock Reunion Special” that was absolutely nothing but an advertorial for the service.
They destroyed the legacy of a brilliant, hilarious sitcom by producing an elongated native advertisement that no one enjoyed.
At the end of the day, all of this was a backlash against
1. the good old days when we could DVR through commercials and
2. when cord cutting actually worked and saved us money.
The leagues and the media outlets could not let that stand. Last year at this time we had YouTubeTV/Google actually dropping the sports we already paid for, and asking us to go fight their battle for them agasint Hulu/Disney/ESPN.
The leagues segmented out their broadcast rights to everybody, so that now you have to get multiple streaming services. So now it’s almost as expensive as cable, but also way more inconvenient and annoying.
And on the technology side, they made it so we now have to sit through every ad for Liberty biberty, limu emu, and various brands of boner pills.
Consider this hellscape, plus the cost of tickets/parking/concessions rising at a rate that far outpaces the rate of inflation in general (at a time when affordability is as much in crisis as its ever been) and well, in the words of Homer Simpson “and once again, us Joe 12-packs are getting the royal screw job.”
Added Moe Szylak: “yeah, we’re getting the Joan Collins special.”
Honestly, when you consider how much the fan is getting gouged (I mean look at the merch- its costs more than ever, yet the material and fabric is as cheap and flimsy as it’s ever been), there is something that can be done.
If you are running for public office and you brand yourself a Populist, run on this. Regardless of your political party, this is a winning issue.
Paul M. Banks is the Founding Editor of The Sports Bank. He’s also the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He currently contributes to USA Today’s NFL Wires Network, Ratings and RG. His past bylines include the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the Washington Post.