Daniel Rubin: She's lost her link to the Phils

At age 94, Jessie Foyle still wakes up each morning and goes to sleep each evening with baseball.

Five Phillie Phanatic dolls watch over her from the window sill in her retirement home. The pillows on her bed are embroidered with pictures of Babe Ruth and other greats from days gone by.

On the walls, framed newspaper headlines from around the country celebrate her 44-year run of attending every World Series game.

Phillies honor "Lady in Red."

Mrs. October.

Cape Lady is riding Series streak.

She's the gray-haired fan with the cape made of ticket stubs from Fall Classics, the unflagging Philadelphian whose love of the game came from a father who played pro ball and taught her to keep score.

All she wants to do now is watch her team on television.

And she can't.

For most of the games, she has to follow the action by straining to hear her tiny transistor boom box. That's tough for a great-grandmother of 15 who is extremely hard of hearing.

Her misfortune was moving last month into a senior-citizens residence that's served by DirecTV. The satellite service doesn't carry most Phillies games. Comcast SportsNet owns the rights to those games and won't share, because it doesn't have to, because of an exemption in federal law.

To make matters worse, she can't switch to Comcast because the local communications giant won't wire just her apartment; it would not be worth it, Comcast officials told her son-in-law, the Rev. Lin Crowe.

A former season-ticket-holder for 30 years, she misses seeing the game. "I don't enjoy it on radio," she told me Tuesday night, sharing the couch in her two-room apartment in Simpson House, a Methodist retirement community on Belmont Avenue. "I just want to see it."

It was the first inning of the Phillies' game against Tampa. The local nine jumped out to a six-run lead before their opponents had even come to bat. I had to shout this information to Mrs. Foyle.

"I don't have an ache," she said. "I don't have a pain. I don't have to take a single pill. But I have trouble hearing."

This was the 30th game she had missed seeing this year.

When she toured her new digs early in May, the woman showing off the place mentioned that each apartment is served by DirecTV, which features a wealth of sports channels - even one for cricket.

It took Mrs. Foyle about five seconds to realize that meant no Phillies for her.

Even before she moved from her Roxborough home, Mrs. Foyle had tried to make sure the Comcast transferred her account to the new place so she wouldn't miss a game. This was in April.

"You see those ads on TV that say, 'Call today, we'll hook you up tomorrow'?" her son-in-law asked.

"They told us we needed to do a building survey. That was supposed to take a week or so. Then we waited, two weeks. We finally realized there was a monopoly issue, a competitive issue, going against us."

Jeff Alexander, a Comcast spokesman, said he understood Mrs. Foyle's frustration. "We are Philly sports fans, and we know how important the home teams are to the city," he said. "There are a lot of variables involved with this situation, but if there is a way we can make it happen, we'll do it."

So what's stopping Comcast from running a wire to her window? I asked.

"As a business, we of course keep an eye toward the economy and efficiency of any given circumstance."

Good they're looking out for someone.

Comcast exploits a quirk in the 1992 Cable Act that allows cable providers with valuable programs to avoid sharing them with satellite operators by sending the signals from the ballpark through the wires as opposed to over the air, which is more expensive.

This is known as the "terrestrial loophole." And as wrong as it may seem to Mrs. Foyle and other innocents, it's legal, it's business, and it's as American as baseball. It's also no way to treat the Cape Lady.