Since the baseball restart, I've seen an awful lot of griping about the baseball streaming blackouts.

I get the frustration, but there are far too many cooks in that kitchen to lift those. And unlike some other TV blackout scenarios, they had nothing to do with attendance.

Here's the thing. RSNs pay HUGE money for the rights to those games to be seen in their home markets, primarily on cable/sat. In turn, they can charge a pretty hefty premium to the cable company per subscriber. That gets passed on to you.

To them, providing their feed to MLBTV is gravy money. They do almost no additional work and get paid a bit extra for it to sell it to out of market subscribers they normally wouldn't be able to necessarily access. But the core of the RSN business still sits with the cable co.

So while the league could try, they would get immediately pummeled with a tsunami of legal action on the part of the regional rights holders.

That's why it's not happening. The RSNs want their money.

Will the way this is all done shift someday? Yes. But it's not there yet.

In the meantime, those channels want their money in full from in-market subscribers. They won't get that much through MLB TV under the current model.

Someday, they'll bite on the idea that people may be willing to pay more to buy directly. But the structure will have to change.

The cable companies also like to have some reasonable measure of protection that they will have the opportunity to take that product to market and in turn, make money.

So the TL:DR is... In-market live sports are tied up in a web of existing contracts involving RSNs and Cable Companies. That's why you're not getting your in-market teams, even when fans cannot attend.

Someday the structure will change, but it just hasn't gotten there yet.