Attention Dodger Fans: Don’t Miss Vin Scully’s Last Few Months

Are you a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers? Do you live in the greater Los Angeles area? Do you get your television service through something other than Time Warner Cable? If you answered yes to all three of those questions, unfortunately you answer yes to this one, too: Are you currently being denied the privilege of listening to the baseball’s greatest announcer calling his final season of Dodger games?

I’m here to give you some good news: There is a solution! Follow the steps laid out in this article, and tonight you can watch the Dodgers take on the Milwaukee Brewers with Vin on the call.

I’ve assumed for the last couple years that TWC would gets deals done with the other TV providers, but it has not happened. We are running out of time to listen to Vin, and if TWC can’t fix it, it’s time to take matters into your own hands.

This solution is not free. But it’s not too expensive, and there’s even a sale going on right now. Here are the two steps to watch your Dodgers:

Step 1: Get an MLB.tv Account

Normally, a full season of MLB.tv is over $100. They have a Father’s Day special going on right now, so you can get the rest of the season for $49.99. Or you can get the single-team package, if you only care about the Dodgers, for $39.99 (normally $85).

The MLB.tv account gives you access to every “out-of-market” game. Unfortunately for you, you live IN the Dodgers’ market, so it doesn’t give you access to the Dodgers. For that, we need…

Step 2: Get an Overplay (or Other VPN) Account

Click on this link right here. (Full disclosure: This is an affiliate link, which means we make a little money if you sign up through the link. If you don’t like that, just go to www.overplay.net directly. It doesn’t hurt you at all to sign up through the affiliate link, though.)

[UPDATE: I don’t even know for sure if my affiliate link with Overplay is still active. Overplay is still what I use, but there are several other options. The only other one I have personally used was UnoTelly, but there’s a list of several other options here.]

Overplay will cost you $4.95 per month (or $49.95 for a full year). But what does it do? The simple answer is that it gets you around MLB’s antiquated and self-defeating blackout restrictions, and it does it seamlessly and legally.

(The technical mumbo jumbo behind it: You update your DNS servers on your router to the IP addresses Overplay gives you. The Overplay system then identifies MLB.tv traffic and ensures that as far as their system can tell, you are watching the game from somewhere outside the blackout area.)

Once you’ve set up your Overplay account and updated the settings on your router, you will be able to watch any game through MLB.tv, not just any “out-of-market” game. Watch on your iPad, your phone, your computer, or on your TV through your Apple TV or Roku or Amazon Fire Stick or whatever.

The Big Question: Does it Work?

Boy howdy, does it ever! I live in Utah, which means I don’t suffer from the same Dodgers restrictions that my SoCal family and friends do. But where I live, I am in the “market” for both the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks. That means there are about 38 Dodger games per season that I am blacked out of.

I get the Rockies’ regional channel, but can you imagine the pain of listening to Drew Goodman and Jeff Huson calling a game from Dodger Stadium when you KNOW that Vin Scully is sitting 15 feet from them doing a much better job?

And with the D-Backs, I don’t even get their channel. I actually live closer to Dodger Stadium than I do to Chase Field, but territory is territory, so I have literally no straightforward way to watch a Diamondbacks game. (See what I mean about antiquated and self-defeating? The blackout rules can easily be restated as, “You are not allowed to watch the teams you live closest to.”)

So I have an Overplay account and an MLB.tv account. Just yesterday, I turned on my Apple TV and had the Dodgers/D-Backs game on in the background, listening to the sound of Clayton Kershaw striking out batter after batter as I worked in my office.

I’ve used Overplay all season so far, and it has been seamless and perfect. I have not thought about it once since I set it up — it just works.

I know this sounds like a sales pitch, and I guess it is. As I said above, if you click the link above to sign up for Overplay, we get a little kickback. But there’s a reason I’ve waited this long to write about it: I didn’t want to recommend something I don’t actually believe in.

Overplay works, and you can listen to Vin tonight.

Here’s that Overplay link again, just in case you don’t want to scroll back up.