Major League Baseball is aiming for mlb.com to be a supper site that meets all baseball fan needs. I would guess that the director of the mlb.com asked the legal division to rain in the none mlb.com sites a little bit with the aim of increasing their own sites hits and revenue.

This is a pretty good strategy for baseball actually. First is provides uniformity to there product. If all fans start there baseball related news gathering by going to mlb.com you get a central influence on news and hype. Second it produces general revenue. This is exactly what baseball needs right now. Of course no general revenue source can overcome the local revenue associated with ticket sales; but baseball needs to look for as much shared revenue as possible in order to reestablish parity. A fan site devoted to the Yankees is taking eyeballs from advertising that benifits all teams.

I have been converted. I think mlb.com is the best professional sports web portal. I used to go the WGN to listen to Cubs baseball on the web but mlb.com centralized web broadcasting of baseball games. I still can hear the Cubs with WGN broadcasters but I have the pay the $10 a season on mlb.com. For this $10 you get the ability to listen to every other team also. And I am guessing the revenue is shared.

Since I like the Cubs it is bad in a way that my dollars are shared but for all the fans of Yankees and Mets doing the same thing, it is good for me and the Cubs that some of their dollars are shared.