Dustbury's CG Hill points me to Salon's King Kaufman's thoughtful (if lefty) piece on how sports is managing to move even further out of the hands of the poor:

So what's happening here is that the NFL, like other major sports entities, is sliding toward more and more games being on pay TV. The league has a policy of showing all cable games on free, over-the-air TV in the home markets of the two teams involved, but that bone doesn't mean much if you're, say, a cableless Cowboys fan in San Antonio, which is Cowboys country but not part of the home market.

Too bad. The reality is if you're a sports fan without cable, the world is passing you by. Cable is where the money is because cable is where teams and leagues can control their own programming, and cable networks like ESPN can pay higher prices for programming than broadcast networks because they collect income from two sources, advertising and subscriber fees.

This is a sad thing because, with very few exceptions, the people who don't have cable -- and there aren't many of them in the scheme of things -- don't have cable because they're too poor to afford it. Sports have long since left poor people behind in the arena by pricing tickets beyond their means, and now they're in the early stages of leaving them behind on television and radio too.

Pensioners who have loved the Boston Red Sox through decades of futility were recently informed by the 2004 World Series champs that the number of games on free TV starting next year will be a convenient, easy-to-remember zero, except for the odd late-season Saturday game on Fox.

The St. Louis Cardinals this winter announced that their games are moving from the clear-channel behemoth KMOX to a smaller station the team bought an interest in, a move influenced by the rise of satellite radio, which figures to lessen the need for teams to broadcast on huge stations or cobble together a team network over a wide area.

My initial response is to roll my eyes because, among other things, an obscene number of poor people who reportedly "can barely afford to put food on the table" can nonetheless afford the no-longer-luxury of cable.

But... he's got a point.

Either professional sports are a community-oriented affair or they are not. If they're not then the owners need to stop using the community as an ATM. If it's not a community service, then they need to stop trotting that out as a reason to keep building trendy new stadia. But if they are a part of a city's civic identity, then there are obligations that need to be met. Ticket prices need to go down and meet the the supply-demand curve (which does not include half-empty stadia). And games -- or at least away games -- ought to be on free television.

Because there are only thirty or so professional teams in a given sport out there when there are probably forty markets big enough to hold pro teams, they use the false scarcity as leverage to play both sides of the coin: Public investment, private profit.