The strike deadline was announced a couple of days ago. As a fan who has followed the season pretty closely, I should probably feel quite angry and rant and rave about how fed up I am... but I really can't be bothered. Perhaps I have become so cynical about the business side of professional baseball that a strike doesn't seem so bad; it's just more of the same crap that goes on with baseball all the time, only there won't be any games being played.

Example: I've been listening to a lot of baseball on the radio this season. I've only been to four games the whole year, partly because I don't want to spend any more money on this season than I have to, and partly because the SkyDome is one of the most depressing buildings I've ever been inside (actually, I've only been to one game here in Toronto, the others were in Montreal, which also has a depressing building. But they've got Youppi). Whenever I think about going to a game in Toronto, I just think of "damp concrete" and "microwaved hotdogs" and stay home and listen to the game instead. Besides, I love listening to baseball on the radio.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, baseball games from every city are now available on the web. It could be, in a perfect world, a baseball fan's nirvana: a chance to hear Vin Scully from Los Angeles, or to hear Ernie Harwell in his final season, or whoever I feel like listening to. Except for one problem: Major League Baseball is charging a fee to listen to the games.

I refuse to pay. Granted, it's not much — I think it's only $15 for the entire season. But I'm disgusted by the principle of it. I understand that MLB has a right to protect its broadcast rights, and I expect that pay-per-view television is an inevitability, and that's fine by me. But paying for radio is unacceptable. This is radio, for gosh sakes. Not only is it unacceptable, it's just plain stupid, the product of whatever sick and twisted (not to mention greedy) minds make these decisions at MLB.

First, they are alienating every fan who can't or won't pay. This would be any fans who don't have a credit card, or don't wish to use it. If I was 13 years old again, I would love to be able to spend the night moving from one broadcast to another, get a chance to listen to the Giants and Barry Bonds' latest at bat. But I suspect that most kids, rather than get their parents to pay for it, will just shrug and move onto something else. And as for me, I'm 27 and can afford it, but I also don't like to get ripped off, and I refuse to ante up.

Second, what are they getting out of it? Fifteen bucks? They're alienating a generation of internet-savvy fans for a crummy fifteen bucks? Yeah, it's cheap... in fact, it's so cheap that it's insulting. It's like a ballpark charging 15 cents to fill out an All-Star ballot. It's cheap but it's so annoying that it gets me even more riled up than paying five bucks for a microwaved hotdog.

So that's my rant for the day. Just say NO to paying for internet radio! Yeah, I would like to listen to Vin Scully... but I've got other ways to spend my time. And I suspect that, come August 30, my CD collection is going to get a lot more use.