Daniel Rubin: Comcast relief for Phillies fan

I promised Jessie Foyle, 94, that I'd bring the popcorn should Comcast cave and wire her retirement home so she could catch all the games of her beloved Phillies.

I should have brought a bigger bag.

Six residents and four guests turned up Tuesday night in the long, narrow sitting room of Simpson House on Belmont Avenue as the team took the field.

"Aren't you glad you came early?" Foyle asked, turning from her front-row seat to address a fellow phanatic named Kitty Edwards. "I didn't know you liked baseball."

"I played softball in the service," Edwards replied. That was 64 years ago with the Fourth Air Force in Walla Walla, Wash. She was a catcher, like Foyle's father. "I got beat up a lot."

Foyle turned and spent the next three innings in deep concentration. The lover of the game known as "Cape Lady" keeps score in pen.

Last month I wrote a column about Foyle's frustration. Although she'd attended every World Series game for 44 years - she'd made capes out of the ticket stubs, hence her nickname - she'd already missed 30 Phillies games on TV this year.

Her misfortune was choosing a retirement home that contracted with DirecTV. Comcast owns the rights to Phillies games, and through a loophole in federal law, the cable provider doesn't have to sell the games to its satellite competitor. So it doesn't.

Foyle was out of luck until last Thursday. At lunch that day, the management of Simpson House announced it would show all the Phillies games in the Lehigh Room, starting that night.

For months, Comcast officials had balked, telling Foyle it wasn't cost-effective to wire just her room - it wanted the whole building.

After the column, Comcast decided to run a line to the closest common area in the seniors' home. Simpson House now pays for basic monthly cable, said David Adam, its executive vice president.

That wasn't what Foyle wanted; she'd prefer to watch West Coast games in her own room. But "it's a good compromise," said her son-in-law, the Rev. Linn Crowe.

Why did Comcast do it?

"We made an exception with the Simpson House," said Jeff Alexander, a Comcast spokesman. "We took into consideration the fact that Mrs. Foyle is such a legendary fan and the property was quick to partner with us."

What that means is that Comcast is not going to rush to string up the sitting rooms of other retirement homes that have contracts with DirecTV.

Which is bad news for Joe Rothman.

He's 82, a retired vice president with After Six who played baseball for Temple and the Air Force. Getting to games has become a challenge since he contracted ALS, known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

For the three years Rothman has lived at the Abramson Center for Jewish Life in North Wales, he has been disheartened by not being able to watch most of the Phillies, Sixers, and Flyers games - those carried by Comcast SportsNet.

He invited me to a meeting of the center's weekly Sports Club, where they discussed, among other things, Comcast's refusal to share its game coverage with DirecTV.

"I've rooted for the Phillies since I was a little kid," Rothman said. "I used to watch them at the Baker Bowl," the team's home at Broad and Huntingdon until 1938.

Now he can watch only the games that are carried nationally or on Fox or MYPHL17 locally.

"The players move around so much these days," he said, sounding like a fan falling out of love. "I don't have so much of a connection."

Maybe that would be different if he could see his team more often. I understand why a business would protect such a valuable property from a competitor. It's playing hardball. The problem is, the game's oldest, truest fans are the ones getting beaned.