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

But for the NFL, none of its customers are right. Not the cable companies, who should pay higher prices to carry the network. Nor its viewers, who should be writing letters to their Congress members rather than succumbing to the tyranny of their cable operators' business decisions. Cable customers who want Sunday Ticket are also wrong, as their years of clamoring have also fallen on deaf ears. Congress and the Justice Department are wrong for not stopping the cable companies from their dastardly plan to bankrupt the hard-bitten league by denying it from, well, unilaterally dictating the terms by which cable companies should carry it.

On Thursday, as those Comcast customers turn on their TV sets and digest the warning that the NFL Network will soon disappear, some will tune into the sight of a verdant grass diamond on which men will play a child's game. They should think about the vestiges of the NFL's previous television strategy, when all they had to bully were the broadcast networks. The strategy, still in effect today, is the local blackout. When a football game is not sold out, the NFL blocks the team's local market from seeing the game on TV at all. Often, the home team itself will buy up thousand of tickets that go unused just to meet the letter of the absurd rule.

Meanwhile, MLB is working on providing access to games through any and every device with a screen or a speaker. If you can believe cryptic Twitter messages, they are even working on providing access through Boxee, the computer-based media center that has dozens of early adopters canceling their cable subscriptions in favor of Internet-based TV. Fandom is not so fickle as to account for one league having a better cable deal than another, but the MLB Network is so far operating as if it needs its customers, rather than the other way around.

(Photo of baseball by Stockbyte/Getty Images; Photo of sky by Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images)