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If you’re an Atlanta Braves fan right now, watching your favorite team can be tough. No, I’m not talking about the growing list of injuries on the team right now, I mean that it is actually tough to watch their games due to the antiquated local blackouts that the MLB insists on keeping in place.

Why are we still doing this? Does the local blackout have a need to exist in this day and age? My answer would be a resounding NO.

With ESPN Plus, you are able to watch almost any MLB, NBA or NHL game, except the ones that are in your viewing area. The only way to watch your local team’s games is by having an expensive cable package that includes your Regional Sports Network (that being Bally Sports South or Southeast in this neck of the woods), or an additional streaming service such as Bally Sports Plus (which will set you back $20 a month) to add to about the half a dozen streaming services you already may have.

With the NBA and NHL, you could at least catch the few games your local team has that are broadcast on national television, but with baseball, even those games are blacked out.

Why do blackouts even exist to begin with? Well, in theory, it’s supposed to keep fans coming to the actual events and spending money at the stadium rather than staying at home and watching games on television. However, in today’s climate, this idea just doesn’t hold any steam.

First of all, it is pretty expensive to go to even one professional sporting event throughout the year as Terrence Jordan expresses in an article on Fansided,

“I’ve got a wife and three kids. Maybe we’ll go to a few sporting events a year, but we’re certainly in no position to get season tickets and attend 81 games a year, even if we did live near a major league team…Even at the cheapest ballparks, a night out with a family of five is going to run a pretty penny. It’s just not realistic to expect people to do that.”

What’s also unreasonable is thinking that people who live in entirely different states can reasonably make it to your ballpark. Again, I am a Braves fan, and the MLB insists that living in Morrison, Tennessee, a 2 hour, 45 minute drive to Truist Park (not accounting for Atlanta traffic), is a reasonable enough trip for me to take 81 times throughout the season instead of just lifting the blackouts on ESPN Plus and YouTube TV.

Not only are Braves fans in Tennessee affected, but so are those that live in Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, parts of North Carolina and Florida and of course, Georgia.

If the MLB and the other sports leagues want to bring in more fans, it would be wise of them to lift blackout rules. Having games more accessible to watch could draw in new fans who might even want to try and make a trip to the ballpark every now and then. It wouldn’t hurt to try and it probably wouldn’t take much effort.