Key point here.

You can't actually stream any other major pro sport in your local market you only get out of market games (ie no Giants baseball in the Giants territory - and the territory extends north to oregon and about 300 miles south of SF)

Here's the funny thing - you generally don't need cable to watch your local NFL team. You can actually usually get your local NFL team using an over the air HD antenna and if you get a decent signal you can get pretty good HD. This is because most NFL games air on local broadcast affiliates which still transmit an OTA signal. Most of the other sports games are on local cable nets.

So really NFL is actually the only sport where you can get a local game feed without cable. So to answer the article's premise - no.