MLB lockout: How to cancel your MLBTV subscription to get back at owners

Baseball fans are urging one another to cancel MLBTV subscriptions to send a message to the league and owners during the MLB lockout. 

With every passing hour, it’s looking like the league and union will not find common ground on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement by Major League Baseball’s chosen deadline of Feb. 28.

The league decided that if an agreement is not reached by the last day of the month (Monday), the regular season will officially be delayed. Worse yet, any games lost will not be made up later.

For the second time in three years, MLB is staring down the barrel of a shortened season.

Of course, unlike the pandemic that slashed the 2020 season from 162 games down to 60, this debacle is entirely the league’s doing. The owners locked out the players when the previous CBA expired on December 1, when they could have negotiated the new one sans lockout and not further fractured the already tenuous relationship between the league and players.

Heck, they could have played the entire 2022 season under the expired CBA, but that would’ve given the players too much power for the owners’ liking.

Throughout the entire mess, fans have looked on like the steerage passengers trapped below deck as the Titanic sank beneath the frigid waters of the Atlantic. The owners have taken all the lifeboats; they will remain rich regardless of whether baseball is played this year, or ever again, for that matter.

For fans, the frustration is overwhelming, especially because there is virtually no outlet towards which to direct it. Owners do not run their teams’ Twitter accounts, nor does Commissioner Manfred run @MLB; they will not see the dumpster fires that are their Twitter mentions, overflowing with angry, heartbroken fans who just want baseball. More than that, they probably wouldn’t care even if they did.

No, words won’t hurt these Scrooges. Only sticks and stones of the financial variety will make a dent.

Cancel your MLBTV before it’s too late

On Feb. 27, fans who pay for MLBTV received reminders on their phones that it is the last day to cancel before their subscriptions automatically renew. In most years, this alert would be ignored without a second thought, because baseball would be on the horizon. But on Sunday, “Major League Baseball” began trending on Twitter as fans urged one another to cancel their MLBTV subscriptions.

Taking your money back from people who’ve made it clear that money is all they care about is pretty much the only way to get them to hear you. MLB does not care about fans’ tweets, Instagram comments, TikToks, any of it. Boston Red Sox principal owner John Henry, currently galavanting around London, certainly won’t see fans’ vitriol, nor will Manfred, who only deigned to appear at meetings late Friday afternoon. Instead, some undeserving social media employees will bear the brunt, an unnecessary misdirection.

But if hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands cancel their MLBTV subscriptions, that sends the only kind of message these people will get. If all they care about is money, do not give them your money.

And when MLB asks you to fill out the section about why you’re canceling, don’t hold back.