WFAN’s Craig Carton and Evan Roberts are not fans of having the April 8 New York Mets-Washington Nationals game exclusively on Apple TV+, and they have their reasons.
Opening Tuesday’s edition of Carton & Roberts, Carton said MLB is alienating the TV audiences of both franchises and forcing yet another subscription streaming service on those who want to watch pitcher Max Scherzer’s Mets debut and return to the place where he earned a World Series ring.
“What a way to get the season started. You get baseball, and you lose baseball,” Carton said. “You get deGrom, you don’t get Scherzer… But it seems like for a lot of people, certainly not everybody, they don’t have Apple TV+. It’s something they may not even know where to begin to go get. And I recognize for the majority of people that it’s not that complicated to get. But it’s kind of like a pain in the ass, right?”
Carton felt like it was too early in the season for one of these types of exclusive national games.
“You’re barely getting into it, and you can’t watch the game unless you go out there and access Apple TV+,” he said.
Roberts chimed in saying he was annoyed by the fact that for the second game of the season, he doesn’t get to watch a Mets game with the SNY team of Gary Cohen, Ron Darling, and Keith Hernandez on the call.
“I love day two, and the fact that on day two, when I watch Max Scherzer stick it to his former team, I gotta hear some national announcer?” he said.
“You’re either not gonna see the second game of the year, or you’re gonna be pissed off by who’s broadcasting this,” Carton said.
No word on who exactly will comprise the TV booth for Friday Night Baseball this season. It’s likely that some kind of announcement will come from Apple or the broadcasters themselves in the coming days.