RandBall: The good, bad and ugly from first game of new Twins TV era

If Thursday’s Twins opener is any indication, the team’s transition to a new TV reality is going to come with plenty of wins and losses along the way.

After communicating with several fans either on email or social media, here are some of my takeaways from the Twins’ first regular-season game with MLB producing and distributing their games.

The good: Fans who do not subscribe to more expensive cable, satellite or streaming bundles generally reported a good experience with the new direct-to-consumer option the Twins are offering this season.

For $19.99 a month or $99.99 for the full season (seven-day free trial to test it out), in-market viewers can get every Twins game except for the handful that are subject to exclusive national broadcast rights.

Some fans are balking at the price, but a lot of them seem to be those who subscribe to cable, satellite or streaming services that don’t carry the Twins (more on that in a minute). Plenty of fans seemed happy to have the option and are giving it a try.

That said, the Twins were helped by Thursday’s rain delay. MLB.TV had a streaming outage that affected the pregame and would have impacted the early part of the game had it started on time at 3:15 p.m. The rain delay pushed the start to 4:45 p.m. and by then the issue had been resolved.

The bad: The Twins and MLB took the announcement of channels and carriers down to the wire Thursday, putting out a news release about seven hours before the scheduled first pitch.

That caused some confusion and consternation with fans, many of whom didn’t see the channels show up on their TVs until an hour or two before the game, though the games were eventually available.

A bigger problem came from fans who didn’t have access to games. I heard from multiple Xfinity/Comcast customers who were disappointed that the game wasn’t on their basic tier, though the Twins had indicated subscribers would need the upgraded “ultimate” package that their games were on at the end of last year after a three-month midseason stretch during which games were not on Xfinity/Comcast.

I heard from one Spectrum cable subscriber who said he couldn’t get the game to work on his mobile app. I heard from Hulu, YouTube TV and Dish Network subscribers who were disappointed that Twins games in the new era were not on those carriers.

Subscribers have been shut out for several years because those carriers dropped regional sports networks like FanDuel Sports (formerly Bally Sports). Again, though, the Twins’ messaging had been that fans who could watch games at the end of 2024 would be able to at the start of 2025.

The most significant and persistent complaint came from customers of Mediacom cable, which serves various pockets of subscribers in Minnesota.

They said the Twins were available on Mediacom last year but are not this year, the latter of which is confirmed by the Twins’ TV finder. Multiple customers/readers showed me correspondence that indicated Mediacom is telling subscribers that the Twins are only offering a direct-to-consumer option and aren’t available on cable this year, which is not true.

The ugly: The worst glitch? At the beginning of Thursday’s Twins broadcast, there was a few minutes of a promotion of the rival Cleveland Guardians.

While I imagine that’s more of a one-off mistake than a sign of overall concern, it was part of a first day that was not nearly as smooth as anyone might have wanted.