Major League Baseball’s Precarious Media Spot
After a regular season of growing fan interest, in-game attendance and TV viewership momentum, Major League Baseball now effectively finds itself right back where it started.
Four two-game sweeps in this year’s Wildcard round meant minimal excitement and an 18% ratings decline year-over-year.
The new playoff format saw many top-seeded (and big-market) clubs upset early for the second straight year, as the favored Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers were sent home despite having home-field advantage.
That new playoff format has been catching heat for two straight years from fans and media (self included), as it seems to needlessly create a larger sample size to a sport that already plays a 162-game regular season.
Oh, and the house of cards around Diamond Sports’ regional sports network debacle — which already saw it drop the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks from coverage midseason — is about to come crashing down.
There’s more to add to that list, too, as MLB stares down the likelihood of another matchup of regionally-limited clubs in this year’s World Series. That will pit the Houston Astros/Texas Rangers American League winner against the National League champ, either the Philadelphia Phillies or Arizona Diamondbacks. Last year’s Astros/Phillies World Series was among the least-watched ever.
The good times could also be fleeting for the regular season, given how much sports — and baseball, in particular — has been cutting itself to pieces in recent years. The blowback from audiences could grow again in 2024 with Max’s new live sports streaming tier.
For as much as the national TV issues persist, though, the bigger problems remain heavily focused on what happens if and when the RSN model collapses in on baseball.
Like all U.S. sports entities, MLB has experienced exponential growth in revenues partly fueled by cable TV, carriage rates and subscriber fees. Some clubs benefit more than others from that model. But the advent of RSNs injected a significant amount of money into the game, which has since been poured into escalating salaries.
So what happens when that falls away?
MLB seems ready to be done with Diamond Sports, which means a mix of local broadcast and MLB-controlled streaming as the fix for nearly half the league. It’s debatable that can make up for the lost RSN revenues for those clubs, especially since the local options won’t feature subscription fees.
For the other clubs — like the Dodgers, Mets, Yankees and Red Sox (among others) — which are taking in much larger RSN payouts via their own standalone RSNs, the other shoe isn’t dropping yet. But could as the cable bundle continues to collapse, since these deals don’t last forever.
Teams like the Yankees have already preempted that with a direct-to-consumer app, though that’s an imperfect stopgap. The price there ($24.99 per month) is aimed at the most diehard fans and is unlikely to attract casuals, , as cable carriage fees have to-date.
DTC subscriptions also require baseball fans to buy into streaming whole-hog. While consumers of all ages are getting savvier about the streaming ecosystem, there’s still a reluctance from many viewers over 55 (and at least some under 55) to bail on local.
MLB’s importance isn’t fading anytime soon (Inscape data shows the playoffs were No. 3 by TV watch-time last week, even with the lackluster on-field results), but it’s still crucial for the league to have a handle on what its future media strategy looks like.
You could argue that while it’s never been easier to find NFL and NHL games (via Disney streaming) on TV, MLB is arguably less accessible now than it has been in years. Baseball is going to be at a serious crossroads when its national TV contracts expire at the end of the decade. And there’s no guarantee the next deals are as lucrative as the current ones… which is not great when combined with likely declines in regional/local TV payouts as well.
