Mike's Mets - Apple TV, Peacock ... Anything for a Buck

 

By Mike Steffanos

Every year, MLB forces fans to work harder to find where their team's games are broadcast.

Back in olden times, when I first became a fan of the New York Mets, not all games were televised. However, there was one easy way to check if you weren't sure: you walked over to your television and tuned it to WOR, Channel 9. It was easy to keep track of, and — as long as you had an antenna capable of tuning in Channel 9 — you could enjoy every broadcast Mets game for free.

I grew up in Hamden, Connecticut. For those not familiar with the area, it's a few miles inland north of New Haven. When I first started watching the Mets, watching games on WOR was a challenge. You had to precisely dial the tuner to get the game in at all, and often had to retune several times during a game. Weather conditions were a factor. A big storm could interrupt a game for several minutes or longer, without regard for games that had reached a crucial turning point. More than once, we waited breathlessly for the picture to come back to see if the Mets had won or not. Even under the best reception conditions, the black and white picture featured ghosts, static, waves, and occasional rolling lines.

Baseball viewing improved exponentially when my family finally sprung for a color tv and upgraded our outdoor antenna to one that you could rotate to different positions with a dial on the control box that sat atop the set. It made a huge difference in tuning in distant New York stations like WOR. The picture became much clearer, almost as clear as local stations. It seemed like a miracle.

But then we moved much farther north in Hamden. While there are no mountains to speak of in Connecticut, the northern part of town was quite hilly compared to the flat plains of southern Hamden. The hills had enough elevation to mess with reception, even with the fancy antenna. To make matters with, local channel 8, the strongest tv signal in the area, broadcast from the top of Mad Mare Mountain in Hamden, which was only about a mile in a straight line from the new house. Channel 8's powerful signal overwhelmed attempts to tune in adjacent channel 9. We were back to watching baseball games with lots of interference.

We lived with that for a couple of years, but then the first cable tv provider in Hamden made it up to our area. Not only did their "massive" lineup of 20 channels include WOR Channel 9, but also SportsChannel New York, which had begun to split coverage of Mets games with WOR. So now watching Mets games meant checking two channels to see who was covering a game, but both channels were received at a quality level that seemed almost miraculous to our eyes.

In those early days of cable tv, the signal was analog. The "remote" looked something like the picture to the right, although our initial 20-channel system only featured 2 lines of buttons. There was a cable that connected the remote to a box on top of the tv, so the use of the remote was limited by the length of that wire. Plus, if you had a puppy in the house, you probably had to pay for a new box more than once until you could convince the little darling to stop chewing through that vulnerable cord.

One benefit of that old analog cable system was that you could still tune channels. One of the worst-kept secrets in the cable world was the Playboy Channel, which was scrambled for those who didn't pay for it, could be unscrambled by tuning the channel. The unscrambled picture was generally black and white and not of the greatest quality, but young (and not so young) boys everywhere knew how to sneak a peek at some undressed women. Ubiquitous internet porn was still several decades in the future.

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