Sunday should have been nothing but a positive day for the Red Sox and everybody remotely associated with them.

They not only had Garrett Crochet, their most important pitching acquisition of the decade on the mound making his debut in the Red Sox uniform, but they also had Alex Bregman, their most important free agent signing of the decade so far at third base making his debut in a Red Sox unfirm.

The Red Sox had this on a beautiful, sun-filled Sunday afternoon right at 1:00pm when all casual sports fans are conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs to flip on the TV and tune into whatever ballgame they can get their paws on.

There was just one little problem. For most of the New England region, the game wasn’t on the New England Sport Network. Instead, it was relegated to different corners of the internet where surprise, surprise, there were issues.

It started innocently enough:

Gee, that’s a good question. There must have been something really important already scheduled in those time slots? Perhaps NESN just couldn’t move things around and do a full soup to nuts broadcast including a pre and post game show on the day the Sox saw their two most important offseason acquisitions of the decade making their debut together.

Just kidding! They were showing Charlie Moore Outdoors again and reruns of in house Bruins programing. I’m sure those really moved the needle!

Meanwhile, Red Sox fans were left scrambling to the internet to try and figure out how to get the game on whatever device happened to be compatible to their situation. Of the many options, some folks tried on MLB.TV, and some tried on NESN 360. Everybody who went down one of these paths got boned!

Here’s a small sampling of what people trying to access the game via those routes were posting during the early innings:

This is ridiculous! Fans are 100 percent correct to not accept this as reasonable behavior from a team’s broadcast partner. People worked all week long, many of them dealing with an endless conveyor belt of technology issues, and all they wanted to do was sit down on a Sunday afternoon with a tasty beverage in hand and enjoy the juiciest pair of spring training debuts the Sox have offered in years. And instead, they were left playing around with their gadgets.

If the higher-ups at NESN and the Red Sox organization as a whole were truly dialed in to the day-to-day operations of what’s going on with this team, somebody, somewhere would have said “this game needs to be accessible on TV throughout New England.”

They already had the production team down there, and they already had Tom Caron and Lou Merloni on the mic broadcasting the game for NESN 360. This was an easy adjustment to make if it was a priority. But clearly it wasn’t. It really makes you wonder, big picture wise, where this is going when we potentially see a league-wide shift in how games are broadcasted. This is a bigger topic for a different post, but it sure feels like the Red Sox are just running out the clock on their cable channel until the next thing comes along for the sport.

Furthermore, this was the team’s chance to take a small victory lap for the most compelling winter they’ve had since the Covid lockdowns. Their chance to shake their ass. Their chance to shove Garett Crochet and Alex Bregman in everybody’s face and plaster them on as many TVs possible.

But instead they left fans with yet another frustrating experience.

Of course, the good news is that the stars did shine. Garrett Crochet struck out the side in the first, and Bregman went 3-3 with the home run in his debut.

But as Brain says in response to the post here …