How baseball learned from football’s mistake and pulled off the biggest cable launch ever.

For the past couple of weeks, Comcast (CMCSA) cable customers have been receiving a message on their TV sets from the ghost in the machine known as the cable executive. The message tells them that the NFL Network will disappear from their service starting May 1. Nothing unusual about that: Every few months, most cable companies go through a refresh; channels move, marginal ones are dropped, and some lineup additions are made. So why is Comcast breaking out the trumpets for the dropping of a single-sport channel during the offseason? In a word, baseball.

For four years, the league-owned network has been battling to get into the living rooms of an America increasingly enamored with its bone-rattling game. But the network is continually forced to guard its flank from cable companies who hate carrying the pricey network. Rather than clamor for the channel, (which is, after all, dedicated to America's most popular sport), every major cable network has balked, playing a game the NFL isn't used to: hardball.

Indeed, six of the top 10 cable companies currently don't carry the channel at all. The result is that the network shows up in about 42 million homes, but in many cases, only on the expensive sports tier, alongside European soccer coverage. The NFL wants to be on the basic system, where Joe Six-Pack can tune in. The animosity stems from the NFL believing it's entitled to ESPN's flagship-level carriage fees, the price cable companies pay to carry a channel on their systems and pass on to their customers. The cable companies, meanwhile, see the NFL Network as bearing a closer resemblance to the single-sport Golf Channel than the 30-year-old premier omnibus sports network. Yet the Golf Channel is widely available on basic cable because of one major difference: Several of the major cable companies, including Comcast, have an ownership stake in the Golf Channel.

Contrast the NFL's Leviathan-like struggle for existence against the ease with which the MLB Network entered this world. On Jan. 1, Day 1, the house organ of America's pastime was available in 50 million homes on the basic digital tier, alongside ESPN, Comedy Central, MTV, and all the other name-brand cable channels. How'd they do it? MLB cut DirecTV (DTV), Comcast (CMCSA), Cox, and Time Warner Cable (TWC) in on partial ownership of the network. It gave them a vested interest in getting the product in front of as many viewers as possible.

Truth be told, baseball didn't plan to manage its game this way. In 2004, when baseball owners voted to create a network, they intended to create a niche product like the NFL's, not a channel that would end up hiring big-name broadcasters like Harold Reynolds and Bob Costas and have a chance at Year 1 profitability. Owners created the network mostly as part of a broader plan to copycat the NFL's popular Sunday Ticket service with its own Extra Innings package.

Sunday Ticket, long the bane of cable-subscriber NFL fans, is a DirecTV-only package that gives viewers access to every game played every week. Fans have long demanded the NFL open up Sunday Ticket to cable, but just last week, the sides announced an extension of the exclusive deal to 2014, locking cable fans out for three more years. Extra Innings was to be a similar beast, but as the cable networks got word of MLB's proposal, they revolted, threatening to banish its MLB Network to the sports tier, years before the network even existed.