As cable model struggles, MLB takes over Padres broadcasts
In a move that could mark the start of a new era in how Major League Baseball games are distributed, the league is taking over production and distribution of all San Diego Padres games, starting with the team’s game against the Miami Marlins on Wednesday night.
The move, announced late Tuesday night, was made after Diamond Sports Group, a subsidiary of the Sinclair Broadcast Group that operates under the name Bally Sports, failed to make payment to the team whose grace period ended Tuesday.
“While we are disappointed that Diamond Sports Group has failed to honor their contractual agreement with the club, we are taking this opportunity to reinvent the distribution model,” Noah Garden, MLB’s chief revenue officer, said in a statement.
Garden said MLB would remove blackouts from local games and increase the reach of Padres games to more than two million homes. The games will be available for free through MLB.com, Padres.com, and MLB’s streaming app through Sunday, and then available to fans on the market for $19.99 per month, a discount off the full price of the streaming services. from MLB. The games will also be distributed on television through cable services such as Spectrum, Cox and DirecTV.
Under the new arrangement under MLB, the team’s main TV broadcasters Don Orsillo, Mark Grant and Bob Scanlan will continue in their roles, as will the team’s radio broadcast crew of Jesse Agler and Tony Gwynn Jr.
MLB had prepared for this, as regional sports networks in several sports struggled in recent years and Diamond Sports Group, which controls the broadcast rights of 14 teams, filed for bankruptcy in March.
At an April meeting in the MLB office in Manhattan, Commissioner Rob Manfred discussed the league’s desire for Diamond to meet its financial obligations, but also made it clear that the league was ready to move forward without Diamond. In declaring the league “ready to go,” he said they had prepared “down to the details like what the graphics package will look like on the air.”
Part of that included hiring Billy Chambers, a former Fox Sports executive, as executive vice president for local media, a new position. In MLB’s statement on the acquisition of Padres broadcasts, Chambers said the league could improve the picture quality of the broadcasts and provide better access during games.
“When you have a crisis, there’s usually an opportunity with it,” Manfred said in April. “The opportunity I see in the diamond crisis is the opportunity to rework the media model.”
However, Manfred said he believed cable broadcasting would survive in some form outside of streaming because “the Rob Manfreds of the world will go into their coffins clutching their cable remote.”
‘I know where everything is. And you know what, I kind of like that,” he said.
It’s unclear whether the Padres are the first domino in a series of league takeovers, but the situation could turn out pretty quickly. Diamond has withheld payments and failed to fully honor its full commitments to four other teams besides the Padres — Cincinnati, Texas, Arizona and Cleveland — and has asked a bankruptcy judge to reduce the fees it owes teams to address a changing market. display, with a possible decision. Wednesday or Thursday.
In a statement about the missed payment and termination of rights, Diamond claimed the company had the funds to meet its obligations but chose not to make the payment to San Diego because “the economics of the contract of the Padres were not in line with market reality. ”
Diamond’s statement said MLB rejected the group’s offer to renegotiate the direct-to-consumer rights for all teams in its portfolio, but said the group intended to open games for other teams under contract. keep broadcasting.