Baseball is the worst. Their app is pretty great but you can't watch local games because they've sold rights to Bally's so you need a cable TV subscription. The Sunday morning game is only on Peacock and that's a separate fee. The Friday night game is only on Apple TV, but at least it's free. The Sunday night game is on ESPN, so again you need a TV subscription. Every once in a while, some game is only on Facebook or YouTube.
Why won't they sell me a tier in their app where I can see all the games? I don't mind paying more.
Why would the Yankees, who own the YES Network, want to give up carriage revenue from that TV network? And it's not just the Yankees -- a surprising number of teams are tied up with regional sports networks, and they're more interested in maximizing that revenue than providing a good online product. And sports fandom is generally localized to the team's location ("we'll root, root, root for the home team/if they don't win its a shame"), so that local cable deal is generally one of the biggest sources of revenue (generally on par with ticket sales).
The only reason why the MLB has a good app is because they can capture the thin slice of revenue teams miss out on from out-of-market fans with that app; there's generally not enough of those fans to drive a per-team standalone subscription service (although the MLB does offer one, it's not price-competitive with the full league option), so the league does it as a whole.
If I would normally see Yankees games on the YES network and I watch a Yankees game on the MLB app, MLB should send a portion of my subscription money to YES.
The issue is that MLB.tv is a lot, _lot_ less expensive than what the Yankees make by offering a cable channel (where they make a lot of money from people who never even tune the channel, because of carriage fees). So that $160/year you pay the MLB would have to outweigh all that money that YES makes because they have exclusive rights to carry games in their broadcast area.
Given how many people I know who pay $80+ a month for cable only for sports, I guarantee you'd get a lot of takers for a "stream any game, any time, anywhere, $350/yr" plan for any of several major sports, including baseball.
For me to get my local teams and the games on ESPN I have to subscribe to a mid-level cable package which costs something like $1000 / year. To get the Peacock games, it's another $5 / month.
Yeah, those are the "local" games whose broadcast rights were sold to somebody else.
When I was in Hawaii I couldn't watch any of the west coast teams - Mariners, Angels, Giants, Dodgers, A's, or Padres because they were the local teams.
This is where it gets asinine - back now 20 years ago the local San Diego network that made a deal for the Padres also made the game free to stream for anyone in the San Diego area - that was nice. I doubt anyone is doing that these days. I don't even care if I get the ad-filled stream (for awhile you could get "raw video" feed on the MLB app, which was fun because when the game went to commercial you'd just see whatever the last camera that had been on wandering around the park) - make it so we can get the game!
And don't even get me started on the "it's easier to be a fan of a team far away than your local one" that is so common now because of all the restrictions.
Why won't they sell me a tier in their app where I can see all the games? I don't mind paying more.