In 2014 I renounced my citizenship in the Red Sox Nation. I was going to watch the games on MLBTV instead of listening to them on the radio (which was a perk of RSN membership.) The first year I watched the TV games in between innings they would have silence with a screensaver style image in the background. Coming from radio where you heard the actual WEEI commercials, the lack of that “entertainment” was jarring. It actually bothered me. The quiet made the three minute breaks seem like ten. By year two I was used to it.
During year three they started throwing up random MLBTV highlights in between innings. I now found the sound from these images jarring, especially since the volume level for them was 30% louder than the game audio. Compounding the misery was there were only 4 or 5 “highlights”, so over the course of a nine inning game you’d see them each about 25 times. Up until now I was just listening to the NESN TV broadcasters do the game and while Dave O’Brien was a decent voice, he didn’t have the chemistry with Jerry Remy that the newly departed Don Orsillo had, so I went back to listening to the radio announcer sound over the TV pictures.
Last year, the fourth, the MLBTV highlights were replaced by those annoying Chevrolet “Real People, Not Actors” commercials. They were made even more annoying by the fact that there was just one of them played like three times during each break so you got to see the same thing like 50 times a game. The radio sound with TV picture worked pretty well against it until somewhere in the second half of the season while watching the games on the Roku box they figured out how to override the radio commercials with the audio from the Chevy commercials (along with the typical volume increase.)
This year I decided to to drop MLBTV entirely and go back to the Gameday Audio. I just couldn’t abide by paying $120 and still having to listen commercials. Well why not join the Red Sox Nation again? For the same $20 it costs just for the radio broadcasts I can get that and a few other perks, so I signed up on March 20th. I didn’t get a chance to listen to a broadcast for several days and when I did I could hear it on the radio but, when I tried using the At Bat app on the phone I couldn’t get access. I could hear using the Roku box, but not on the Kindle.
I contacted MLB Customer Service via email to ask what the problem might be. The first email told me to go to settings and login with my credentials – well, no shit Sherlock, already tried that. Next email from them told me to uninstall the app, restart my phone, install the app and sign in. Even though I already done this once, I did it again. Emailed back to tell them that it didn’t help. MLB emailed back with, “We will contact you via phone.”
The actual customer service person I spoke to started to run me through some corrective attempts, but he must have been in training because at nearly every step of the way he would have to put me on hold for a minute to find out what was next. It was an excruciatingly slow process and when I realized we were doing the same two emailed scenarios again I hung up in frustration. While I was on hold with the CSR I went online to the Red Sox Nation web site and found a contact phone number there. It wasn’t an 800 number, the area code was 617 (Boston, MA), so I dialed it and got an answering machine.
I got a call from that same phone number a few minutes later and when I told the woman what my problem was, she explained that the Red Sox Nation Gameday Audio thing only applied to computers, not mobile devices. She could offer me my money back because I was unsatisfied with my membership, so I took it. Then waited a day and purchased the At Bat app on my phone and not only can I use it on the phone, but on both computers, the Roku box and the Kindle too.
