What happens to Twins games if Bally Sports goes bankrupt?
One of the biggest issues with baseball is its lack of availability. Fans can purchase MLB.TV to have access to any game they desire, but only a select few are truly available due to blackout rules instituted decades ago by regional sports networks.
The pain has only intensified for Twins fans as Bally Sports North has made their channel exclusive to cable providers – with the recent exception of Fubo TV – at a time when most fans are switching to streaming services such as Hulu and YouTube TV. But as Bally's parent company, Diamond Sports, is reportedly set to file for bankruptcy, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred could institute a plan that could eliminate blackouts once and for all.
"I hope we get to the point where, when you go to MLB.tv, you can buy whatever the heck you want," Manfred told reporters Thursday. "You can buy an out-of-market package. You can buy local games. You can buy two sets of local games. Whatever you want!"
The current situation involves Diamond Sports, a subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcasting. In 2019, Sinclair purchased the rights to 17 regional networks owned by FOX Sports and rebranded them as "Bally Sports" networks in 2021. Sinclair slowly pulled the channels from online streaming services and fans of 13 MLB teams have been sent to purchase Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or scrambling to the dark corners of the internet just to catch their favorite team.
The situation is even worse in Iowa where the state is blacked out from the Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Twins, St. Louis Cardinals and Kansas City Royals, leading fans to purchase a giant billboard outside of the Field of Dreams game in Dyersville, Iowa in 2021.
MLB has the infrastructure in place to broadcast its own games as it was estimated that MLB.TV had over 3.5 million subscribers in 2020 and is adding minor league games as a new feature this season. But with regional networks paying upwards of $10 million per season for the rights to broadcast games, it's a giant chunk of money that MLB and other professional sports leagues are leaving behind.
According to the Star Tribune's Phil Miller, the Twins have earned in the neighborhood of $50 million per season from Bally Sports North for the rights to broadcast their games.
While Manfred didn't exactly pop champagne over the news of Bally's potential bankruptcy, he did admit that it created an opportunity to end MLB's archaic blackout rules.
"From a fan's perspective, though it may not be whatever channel is your traditional RSN, if you think about it from a reach perspective, the games being available digitally in-market is something fans have been screaming for years," Manfred said.
"The blackout issue has been a concern for a number of years. Some of it, maybe a lot of it, was built into the structure of the RSNs [but] the issue has become more acute in the last few years," Manfred continued. "And our aggressiveness with respect to stepping in, in the event that Bally can't broadcast, was driven in part by the fact that we saw it as an opportunity to fix the blackout."
For now, Twins games are scheduled to be broadcast on Bally Sports North. If bankruptcy takes Bally Sports out of the picture, MLB will undoubtedly have a plan to make it easier for fans to watch. But how that happens how much it'll cost are unknowns.
