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

Meanwhile, DirecTV, which thought it was getting Extra Innings all to itself, balked when it learned MLB was pitching Extra Innings to cable operators. Sunday Ticket is a cash cow for DirecTV thanks in part to its monopoly on the product. The satellite provider charges well more than $100 a season for access to the games, which are simulcast from the networks. But for Los Angeles Dodgers fans trapped in Cleveland, assuming they can get satellite service, that's a small price to pay.

MLB, seeing its strength based on the desirability of Extra Innings, pitted the cable and satellite operators against one another until both sides gave in. "We used the out-of-market package to leverage distribution, to be quite honest with you," MLB Vice President Tim Brosnan told reporters at the time the deals were announced. Cable companies would be allowed to carry the Extra Innings package, but DirecTV would keep the sweetest part of the ownership deal. (It owns one-sixth of the network, equal to the share of the three cable companies combined. The league owns the rest.) By cutting carriers a small but significant slice of the profits, MLB all but guaranteed itself the largest cable channel launch in history and, more importantly, peace with its carriers. Most pleasantly for viewers, the network makes no demands of their time or political energies. It's just showing baseball.

In contrast, if you don't get the NFL Network, the league offers a Web site for you to complain about that fact, at one point seemingly to everyone from your city council, Congress member, cable operator, and bartender. It also suggested, in past iterations, that you forget complaining and just switch to DirecTV. Its CEO penned an op-ed run by the Philadelphia Inquirer explaining to newspaper readers in what particular way Comcast is screwing them and how the NFL is not responsible for fans' misery at having to follow football on ESPN. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who is leading the effort to get the NFL Network adopted in his standard wildcatter style, has said, "Our fans don't deserve to be building equity for a distribution company." It stands to reason that Jones thinks fans do deserve to get caught up in the machinations of the league's cable carriage agreements? The NFL, then, is trying to play hardball with the cable companies, too, but rather than trust the unmistakable message of a high and tight fastball, they are pitching right for the batter's head.

This season, MLB Network will show only 26 in-season games, called Thursday Night Baseball, because of existing TV deals with ESPN and Fox. But as those deals come up for grabs, MLB will cut itself into the rights pie and become increasingly relevant to baseball fans in years to come.

Contrast this with NFL Network's Thursday night games, which are mostly unwatched regional affairs. Except for unexpectedly hot late-season matchups with playoff implications—then, the NFL Network gets letters from Sen. John Kerry demanding it bend its rules and show the game to the noncable proletariat. And while MLB Network chief Tony Petitti thinks the network might one day show playoff baseball and even the World Series, the NFL has turned the Super Bowl into such a pop-cultural orgiastic display of advertising, media awareness, and even a little football that it can't possibly take its premier event away from the broadcast networks, let alone show it on the woeful sports tier. And since NFL teams have just 16 games compared with baseball's 162-per, clawing back more contests during future television-contract negotiations won't be a viable strategy either.

There's a simple business rule that says the customer is always right. With the baseball season starting this week, MLB Network is introducing a feature called Live Look Ins, where a few minutes of any game happening in the league can be shown on its network. It's likely that for a key at-bat, a record-breaking home run, or the last out of a no-hitter, fans will quickly memorize the MLB Network's local channel number to see history. This feature is the very definition of giving the customers what they want, despite the league's having to cut across complicated rights contracts to provide the feature.