Netflix's MLB debut was self-promotion with a side of baseball: Opinion

There have been times over the past three decades when Major League Baseball has come off perhaps a little too desperate. Crises both self-inflicted (the canceling of the 1994 World Series) and external (Big Football consuming the attention economy, the collapse of linear television) can make the erstwhile national pastime scramble to claw back some of that cultural currency. And it seemed like more of the same when MLB agreed to sell a pair of prime real estate properties – a standalone Opening Night game and the much-loved Home Run Derby – to Netflix.

Hey, gotta meet the viewers where they are and besides, the $50 million annually for three years doesn’t hurt. Yet when the time finally came for this standalone opener on a nascent sports broadcaster to get beamed to some 300 million global subscribers, it wasn’t the league that came off desperate to leverage the window. It was Netflix.

You’d think a global brand whose name is synonymous with streaming like Coke and Xerox are for their products wouldn’t feel the need to force-feed the viewer with noxious, wall-to-wall promotions of their #content. Silly us, failing to realize Netflix was actually bigger than the game. From Daniel Dae Kim’s game intro (catch him in "Avatar: The Last Airbender") to pro wrestler John Cena’s strange assignment to explain the automatic ball-strike system (hey, be sure to watch "Little Brother," where he stars alongside Eric André, and Michelle Monaghan) to Bert Kreischer’s floating around in a kayak and his pregame screaming as on-field MC, the viewer was never allowed to breathe.

" Free Bert "? No, set us free. By the time they found Yahya Abdul-Mateen II conveniently seated behind home plate (hey, "Man on Fire" drops April 26!