Categories: News

Here’s how you can watch tonight’s Phillies-Marlins game

Bryce Harper is in his fourth season with the Phillies. (Dustin Bradford/Icon Sportswire)

If you’re wonder what of the few regular television channels that the Philadelphia Phillies-Miami Marlins game will be on Saturday evening, the answer is none of the above.

Joel Embiid and the Sixers will begin their postseason against the Toronto Raptors on NBC Sports Philadelphia at 6 p.m. ET, which obvious takes precedent over an early-season Phillies game.

The Flyers are hosting the Buffalo Sabres on NBC Sports Philadelphia+ beginning at 5 p.m., which will block the Phillies from playing on the channel they often are found on early in the season.

Evidently NBC 10 and Cozi TV were booked this evening as well.

So the only way for most people to watch the Phillies take on the Fish this evening at 6:10 p.m. ET will be to stream it on the MyTeams app on your phone, the NBC Sports App on your TV or directly on NBC Sports Philadelphia‘s website. If you don’t have a cable or satellite log-in, none of the aforementioned options will work for you.

Even if you leave out that the Phillies are on a four-game losing streak, the game not being on television will cause a lot of older people to choose to do something else, rather than watching the game in a non-traditional way.

The other side of that is that there’s an increasingly larger chunk of people who don’t have cable at all. So while they would love to watch the game via one of the streaming options, they aren’t eligible to do so.

There’s been a lot of chatter online recently about how MLB isn’t doing itself any favors making older viewers have to try to jump through hoops to watch games on apps or through services that they have to go to effort to log-in into. But the reality is that those viewers have a log-in and can watch games like this if they can figure things out. Those who no longer want to pay for a cable subscription would have no problem logging into the MyTeams app to watch the game or hooking up their laptop through an HDMI cord to their TV to stream the game on the NBC Sports Philadelphia website. But without a cable log-in, they are left out too.

From here, the battle to keep viewers paying for cable just so they can watch baseball has been lost. While viewers would love to have the chance to watch the Phillies or any other team, the overwhelming majority of shows they watch are on Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and Apple TV. Many viewers — again, particularly younger ones — have decided to ditch the exorbitant prices for cable TV, and just pick streaming services that they know they will consistently use. And if they can’t watch baseball because of it, well that’s a trade off that they’re willing to make if they can save money for paying rent or for groceries.

There may not be one solution to this, but as older viewers are content to continue playing for cable, it’s become clear that another approach is needed to keep viewers 50 and under.

It would be in the best interests of MLB to make games in your local market available with an MLB.TV subscription. Currently, if you’re in Philadelphia, you can easily watch the Los Angeles Dodgers or Chicago Cubs if you pay for MLB.TV. But local games are still blacked out, because there’s an archaic idea that this will force viewers within the market to either go to the game or pay for cable. What’s happening more often than not is that those viewers just find something else to do instead of watching baseball. At the very least, you should be able to pay an annual, monthly or by-game fee to watch the Phillies on the MyTeams app without a cable log-in.

Anyway, it should also be noted that the game can be heard on SportsRadio 94 WIP, either via the radio or the Audacy App.