Paulie4Pres

Was this actually a thing? Holy s%*#...

Talk to me October 1st.

And one instance where the metrics and the eye test match up perfectly. There's literally nothing there. He's a AA caliber player.

It is just mind blowing that they accepted this guy as the return for their best trade assets. You won't be able to give him away next season. He's total garbage.

Vargas is one of the worst baseball players I have ever seen. Why is this asshole playing 3rd again?

By the way, I wouldn't get my hopes up for YouTube TV. Of the teams that have moved to OTA recently, only the Anaheim Ducks have a channel on YouTube TV that shows all of their games. Mavericks, Kraken and Golden Knights have one of their channels currently on YouTube TV. The issue is those channels will NOT be showing all the locally televised games, only simulcasting a select few per season. So just having those channels isn't enough. Since those channels are the main ABC and NBC affiliates in their respective region, most of the time they'll only be good for pre and post game shows—if that.

No. And of course, the gutless sports reporters in this town haven't questioned any of this.

The reality is that they are going to be on a channel that is only broadcast from one tower in the Chicagoland area, and a whole bunch of people that aren't directly in the Chicago metropolitan area are going to be screwed. Like, screwed badly enough that even installing an antenna on your roof isn't going to help anything.

"The Comcast deal will be the tough one." Just what the millions of Xfinity customers who are fans of the Bulls, Blackhawks, and White Sox, want to hear! By the way, if you're more than 60-70 miles from Willis Tower, good luck getting any of these games OTA. Even suburbs like Naperville are going to struggle with signal quality. Suffice it to say, yellow isn't good. The signal will be hit or miss, and weather dependent. Red is unusable.

https://www.channelmaster.com/pages/tv-antenna-map-chicago-il-60660 I would suggest anyone who plans on utilizing the OTA broadcast to check this beforehand. There are a whole bunch of areas around Chicago where 62.2 and 62.3 have trash signal.

Forgive me for not trusting anything Reinsdorf has his greedy little hands on.

Well, the White Sox season has been over since March. Neither the Bulls or Blackhawks will have started their season come that deadline. So I'm not sure why it matters that NBC Sports will still be available until 10/1?

Weird. The Capitals and Wizards fans suffered through no such thing. Oh, that's because they made the best decision for their fanbase, and not their owner's pocket.

NBC Sports Chicago will be shutdown before the Bulls or Blackhawks play a single regular season game. I would put $1000 on CHSN not being available on YouTube OR Xfinity come October 1st.

So their customers will suffer so they have leverage to deal with Xfinity and streaming providers. All in the name of the almighty dollar. Again, see my post above. They could have avoided all of these headaches by doing exactly what the Capitals/Wizards JUST did in Washington. They CHOSE not to. Almost assuredly because it would cost JR and Wirtz more money.

Hawks preseason starts in a week. Bulls preseason starts in three weeks. They haven't even mentioned the workings of a deal with Xfinity or YouTube TV. I doubt they ever get a channel with YouTube TV. If they do, that's going to take a significant amount of time. Hell, they haven't even finalized the deal with DirecTV yet! I'm not complaining about it being available OTA. The games being broadcast for free OTA is a GREAT SUPPLEMENT for people that don't have existing services to watch the game. But to not offer the same availability to Xfinity and YouTube TV customers that you did previously is a huge gaffe on their part. There's a large portion of their fanbase that is just going to say f*** it, and not watch their shitty teams. They vastly overestimate brand loyalty here. Just a couple more billionaires who are attempting to squeeze more profit out of their product, at the expense of the consumer. They are, once again, screwing their fanbase to do so. The owner of the Washington Capitals and Wizards bought the rights to NBC Sports Washington and rebranded it. Which leads to a seamless transition for your fans and customer base. No agreements needed with providers. No channel changes. No changes in production quality. Just a logo and some branding changes, and you're off running. These greedy, incompetent assholes decided they didn't want to pay that cost. They decided instead, that they wanted to just blow it all up. It's going to bite them in the ass. Telling your fans who have been watching the team for years on their existing services to "just go buy an antenna and hook it up" to watch your team is marketing malfeasance. The overwhelming majority of their fanbase(old people) probably isn't even capable of figuring that out without some kind of technical assistance. Especially if you have a wall mounted TV, and have never dealt with an internal TV tuner on your Smart TV before....

It's an inferior product because you can't pause the game, rewind the game, or record the game, without spending at least another $100.. OTA broadcast quality also depends entirely on your signal quality. You know, since it's using radio waves? Ever park your car in the garage and have some radio stations that start breaking up? Have fun with that if you live in a location that doesn't get a good quality signal for the channels they put these teams on. Which will absolutely happen for some people. Why do you think we went away from having giant antennas on our roofs in favor of cable connections? I'm not even getting into the colossal pain in the ass it is to pipe your OTA audio into a receiver if you have a surround setup in your house....

It's the principle here. Why should I have to spend any amount of money, for an inferior product? Most people already have some kind of TV subscription, so none of this is "free". Whether that be DirecTV(the only provider these imbeciles have a deal with, lol), Xfinity, or YouTube TV. Nobody is cancelling their subscriptions because they can watch these teams OTA. An OTA antenna is also a downgrade in every way for watching sports. No rewind, no pause, no recording, inferior PQ. You want that, you get to spend more money. Not to mention, signal issues. Also, plugging an antenna into a TV works for some people at home (I would have to literally take my 65 inch TV off the wall to do this, but I digress.) You know where plugging an antenna in doesn't work? At all the bars that you might want to watch a Bulls/Blackhawks game in a couple weeks... Most of which, have Xfinity as their provider....which these clowns don't have a deal with yet. They should have had streaming and broadcast rights sorted out months ago, with two of these teams starting their season in a couple weeks. The Bulls and Blackhawks are going to start the season with most customers unable to view the games without installing a damn antenna. Let that sink in.

Most televisions don't, in fact, have an OTA tuner that works without an external antenna... Which is why they have a port specifically labeled "cable/ant". Most have a tuner, but those require....an antenna.

This is honestly absolutely hilarious. It's 2024. While free OTA broadcasts are nice, nobody is hooking up a fucking antenna to watch the Bulls, Blackhawks, or White Sox. I'm not sure it would even be possible to do such a thing in a bar where the wiring is already in place. The fact that the Bulls and Blackhawks are going to start the season, and the only broadcast company they have worked out a deal with is.... Direct TV, is truly amazing levels of incompetence. This doesn't surprise me from a Reinsdorf perspective, but I expect better business and decision making out of the Blackhawks. It's shocking they hitched their horse to this stupidity. Also, nice of them to make sure we will have HD broadcasts for hockey in....*checks notes* 2024. Hockey isn't even watchable in SD once you've watched in HD and 4k.

Well, with Maldonado gone, someone has to bat .100....

You think this team is capable of winning 9 of 14? Lol.

If they folded the franchise would anyone even care?

Someone needs to tell me why this kid was EVER a highly rated prospect.

Total fucking incompetence at all levels.