Keep me in for the ballgames

By Mike Trask

Thursday, June 7, 2007 | 7:14 a.m.

Mark Juraschka is one of the biggest Yankees fans in the Las Vegas Valley. His Nevada license plate - NYY 23 - is a tribute to Don Mattingly.

He pays $179 per season to watch the Bronx Bombers from his Henderson apartment. Yet despite being about 2,500 miles from New York and paying the Extra Innings package fee to Cox Communications, he still gets blacked out about 40 times each season.

To Juraschka, it's more infuriating than a Red Sox sweep of the Yanks.

When the Yankees play Oakland, forget about it. If Fox Sports Net West doesn't show the Angels' games, he has no chance. And this month's interleague games against San Francisco and Arizona also won't be available to Juraschka and hundreds of other annoyed New York fans in Las Vegas.

"The only ones I care about are the Yanks," the 27-year-old said. "It's frustrating."

Six Major League Baseball teams - the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Angels, the San Diego Padres, the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's - claim Las Vegas as their territory, part of baseball broadcasting rules that are more complex than the infield-fly rule.

"Is that crazy or what?" said Steve Schorr, Cox Communications vice president for public and government affairs.

The territorial rules have their origins in the early days of sports broadcasting, when team owners worried that live radio or TV game coverage could hurt their gate by keeping fans in their living rooms instead of at the ballpark.

But none of the teams occasionally blacked out in Las Vegas is closer than Anaheim, which is 265 miles away. And if you were thinking of hopping in the car and driving the 570 miles to a game in San Francisco, let's hope you start the trek about daybreak.

In other words, it's difficult to see how a game televised in Las Vegas could harm home attendance for any of the six teams, each of which sets its own territorial boundaries. In fact, it could be argued that more televised games could boost ticket sales by tempting more Las Vegas Valley fans to make a weekend baseball trip to California or Arizona.

The same broadcast restrictions apply to National Football League and National Basketball Association games.

"It happens in every sport," Schorr said. "It's all the same cities."

But Schorr said baseball tends to draw more fan ire because, with 162 games each year, more people buy the cable package than the ones available for other sports.

The simple math shows that Las Vegas viewers aren't seeing as many as 12 baseball teams - the blacked out teams and their opponents - each night on the pay-per-view cable ($179) or Internet ($109) packages.

Locally, Cox and DirecTV have their hands tied. They must black out the games - sometimes as much as 40 percent of the leagues' nightly schedule.

Three teams can be seen regularly on Cox cable: the Dodgers, Angels and Padres. DirecTV shows both Los Angeles area teams on FSN West and the Diamondbacks on FSN Arizona. The satellite company also carries FSN Bay Area, which broadcasts A's and Giants games.

None of those networks, however, carries the teams' full schedules.

To further complicate the matter, all Saturday games that begin before 2 p.m. are available only on local Fox stations and all Sunday games that start after 2 p.m. are only on ESPN.

The complicated system - and blacked out games - have been chatted about for years. But nothing has been done to change it.

Major League Baseball is handcuffed by lucrative broadcasting deals on the weekends. The rest of the time individual teams decide who can watch games on TV.

The territories for each team were set before cable TV's omnipresence and the advent of the Internet.

The rules, set to protect the value of franchises' TV rights, allow the six teams to negotiate with cable officials in Las Vegas to air the games. Most haven't done so, meaning the arcane rules keep pay-per-view customers blacked out.

Last month Major League Baseball officials asked teams to review broadcast territories and perhaps revise them to allow fans greater access to a product for which they're willing to pay.

"It's a tangled web," said Scott Geyer, the Diamondbacks' vice president of broadcasting. "The challenge is to find those pockets that aren't getting the games. We're trying to work around the rules to make sure our fans get to see games they want to see."

Major League Baseball declined to comment on the issue, as did the five other teams that black out games here.

However, many expect teams to be forced to justify their territories, meaning the six teams might be required to explain why a city in another state, across a desert, should be banned from seeing games.

If they can't provide a satisfactory answer, Juraschka finally might be able to see the Yankees play at the Oakland Coliseum without leaving his couch.