My text threads were flying fast and furious last night during the Yankees’ 7–0 Opening Day victory over the Giants on Netflix—you know, that little streamer once referred to as the Albanian army that’s been tantalizing the sports media business with its enigmatic, methodical plan to achieve global content domination ever since. Opening Day is an annual springtime ritual filled with mirth and anticipation. But it’s also the threshold of an arduous slog that now runs from March to November, across 162 games and 30 teams (with a possible future strike as a backdrop), and now, various new media partners. In other words, for Netflix, it’s just more clay on the potter’s wheel to get eventized! Right?!

Currently, the company is paying MLB about $50 million a year for the rights to carry three events: the Opening Night game, the Home Run Derby, and one regular-season theme game that, in this year’s case, will take place at the ballpark in Dyersville, Iowa, where Field of Dreams was filmed. Netflix originally agreed to the three-year deal using the same logic that drove its investment in boxing and Christmas Day NFL: aggressively attempting to optimize its ad-tier business via special live event programming in order to placate the Wall Street analyst community.

On the surface, the eventization erogeny was everywhere last night. Polarizing misanthrope Barry Bonds, who also happens to be the greatest hitter in between the Williams and Ohtani eras (send the hate mail to Marchand), was on the pregame. Wrestler Jey Uso threw out the first pitch. (Two years ago, Netflix signed a deal to become the exclusive home for WWE Raw.) The kinda funny comedian Bert Kreischer was ripping Coronas on a paddle board in the bay, anticipating a Ben Rice or Aaron Judge bomb that never landed. Alas, viewers missed the first-ever A.B.S. challenge in the fourth inning because of a boring dugout interview with Tony Vitello, who is on his own Brad Stevens–esque journey.

Then there was New York Giants backup QB Jameis Winston, who also played baseball at Florida State, yucking it up with Harrison Bader, a former Gator. And, hell, an inadvertent prep-school gimmick: That moment when Harvard-Westlake alum Max Fried squared off against Bader, who went to Horace Mann, surely made all their lawyer-banker former classmates exceedingly proud! Anyway, my crowd had feelings about all of it.

But when you strip away all the public displays of eventization, Netflix’s first MLB telecast felt like pretty much any other baseball game on network television. In fact, when Netflix tried to sell its baseball package to advertisers, the company quickly discovered that the market felt the same way: According to a half-dozen sales executives I spoke with, advertisers were generally not persuaded by the streamer’s pitch that baseball’s first game of the season qualified as a big event.

Instead, the market broadly viewed the game as merely the first of 2,430 in the regular season—a drop of water in a sea of tonnage. “They came to us with a ‘full-season package,’ but nobody is buying that,” one ad buyer told me. “There’s not a single advertiser across this business that’s going to desperately need to be in this Opening Night game. For Netflix, this is an event. But in reality, it’s not, especially since tomorrow there are 11 games we could buy.”

Another glaring problem for Netflix last night: Several of the ads that appeared during the game were make-goods for partners due to the streamer’s failure to gin up the viewership it had promised for those NFL Christmas games. While Netflix averaged an impressive 27.5 million viewers for the Lions–Vikings game and 19.9 million for Cowboys–Commanders, those figures still fell short of the viewership guarantees in the 18-54 demo. (Sources said they were around 18 percent below projections.)

Make-goods are a time-honored tradition in the television business. When a broadcast network fails to reach a ratings guarantee for, say, an NFL game, it will run an ad the following week in another NFL game. The issue with Netflix is that it doesn’t have a lot of sports programming with which to make good. The streamer offered up some of its entertainment programming as an alternative, but the NFL advertisers bought live sports, and—rather understandably—many of them wanted to run against other live sports. (The highbrow brilliance of Monday Night Raw wasn’t going to work for most.)

Anyway, TV viewership should come out in the next few days, and advertisers are expecting to see big numbers internationally. But U.S.-based advertisers generally aren’t as interested in international viewers, who can’t buy or use their products—yet another wrinkle. Perhaps the lesson for Netflix is that genuinely big events can’t be manufactured. Even if they manage to pack more stars in a stadium than the Milky Way, the only thing that advertisers really want to see is more viewers tuning in.

On retrans and antennas: “A note to the whiny ‘cable guy’ from last issue who mocked NAB president Curtis LeGeyt’s claim that broadcast networks are ‘freely available.’ You must be smoking something illegal in many states, because Curtis is 100 percent correct. The Super Bowl, the Olympics, March Madness, the NBA finals, the World Series, and the Masters come free of charge for viewers who slap up an inexpensive antenna.” —A blissfully retired NAB spokesman

On safety schools: “As a UNC fan, I loved seeing you refer to Duke as the ‘number one safety school.’ I wonder what Duke alum Adam Silver thought when he read that.” —A media executive

[Ed. note: Silver is also the board chair of said renowned safety school.]

On commercial licenses: “DirecTV losing Sunday Ticket in the bars and restaurants late last week seems like it should be a bigger story, especially for casinos and some larger establishments. Will streaming technology deliver?” —A sports TV consultant

On the dearth of NCAA tournament upsets: “Cinderella is dead. It was obvious back in 2023 what was about to happen. What’s happening to college sports pains me. A fix for the one percent is destroying opportunities for the other 99 percent.” —A former D1 assistant A.D.

Have a great weekend. Let’s go O’s. And see you Monday.

John