The Kansas City Royals have been off to a hot start on the 2024 MLB regular season, with the team attaining victories in seven of its first 11 games played. Young phenoms such as Bobby Witt Jr. and established veterans including Salvador Perez are showcasing their talents as they look to help the Royals attain a playoff berth for the first time in nine years.
Baseball fans can watch the Royals through Bally Sports Kansas City, the regional sports network responsible for the team’s local television broadcasts. Additionally, fans are able to subscribe to Bally Sports+, the network’s direct-to-consumer option, where fans can view the games without a television provider. There are various kinds of subscriptions from which to select, something that encapsulated the recent discussion on the 610 Sports Radio midday program Cody & Gold.
Co-host Alex Gold revealed that he has been annoyed by people discerning how others can be excited about the Royals since they cannot watch the team. This proposition, he stated, is false because there are numerous ways to consume the live game broadcasts in real time. One of them is through the Audacy app, which Gold noted is free to download and includes Royals broadcasts on 610 Sports Radio, the team’s flagship radio home. For those who want to see a video feed of the game though, they will need to utilize a different method.
“You may not like the app – and I’ll admit the app sucks; it just does,” Gold said. “The Bally app sucks – it’s not a great app, it crashes. It’s not great… but the idea that you can’t watch the Royals though is laughable. It is just as accessible as any other ballclub. Yeah, it’s not 2005 where you can just flip on the TV. I wish it was on YouTube TV as well; I’m right there with all of you guys.”
Gold asserted that it is a choice whether or not to watch the Royals, leading his co-host Cody Tapp to share that he also argues with people about the accessibility to the games. Consumers can subscribe to Bally Sports+ for $20 a month, a pricepoint he states can be cut in half if you are able to find someone with whom to split the plan. Gold conveyed that you can share the password with one other person to access two concurrent streams. Not being able to do that, he said, equates to someone complaining that they cannot watch Ted Lasso on Apple TV+ when, in reality, it is available on an OTT streaming platform rather than traditional linear television.
“It’s just because back in the day, you were able to just flip on the TV and watch, and that’s just not reality of how streaming and how baseball and how sports in general are going, and the NFL is the exception,” Gold replied. “The NFL’s the one exception with live sports that you can still flip on – and it’s trending in the other direction, hence the reaction to the playoff games being on Peacock if you weren’t in Kansas City.”
Gold admitted that the Bally Sports app cut out two times when he was watching the Royals game on Tuesday night, which ended with a walk-off victory over the Houston Astros. It began to work when he re-entered the app after each impediment, allowing him to ultimately be able to watch the game. Tapp added that MLB.TV allows Royals fans to watch the games if they are out-of-market and costs “about the same depending on where you buy it.” The discontent towards the situation, however, is somewhat of a matter of perspective as the media landscape continues to evolve.
“You were paying for it still before – it just seemed more convenient,” Tapp said. “It was built into your cable, but you were paying something for it, and we all went to this chop-down version where essentially we’re paying the same amount as cable, I get it, for like seven different streaming apps.”
Tapp suggested that if fans want to watch the Royals play baseball throughout the season, it would be advisable to cut out another streaming app in the time being. One hundred sixty-one of the Royals’ 162 regular-season games during the 2024 campaign with the primary broadcast team of play-by-play announcer Ryan Lefebvre and analyst Rex Hudler.
“Like, ‘No Netflix for the Summer,’ and instead you get Royals baseball,” Tapp stated. “I don’t think that that’s crazy to me. ‘No Peacock, no Prime,’ whatever one you pay for monthly that you don’t think you’re going to use as much in the summer because you’re watching the Royals, do that or just don’t watch. But I’m telling you, the excuse of, ‘I can’t watch them. They’re not available to me,’ I just think, like you do, is just factually untrue.”
