St. Louis Cardinals fans who watch the games on Comcast Xfinity were thrown a curveball last week when Bally Sports Midwest disappeared from their service.
Comcast and Diamond Sports Group couldn’t come to an agreement to keep Bally Sports Midwest and 11 other regional sports channels on the cable TV provider by the May 1 deadline.
“Unfortunately, the Cardinals and Major League Baseball have no voice in this matter, but are hopeful the two sides will come to an agreement as soon as possible,” the team said last week in a statement.
St. Louis Public Radio’s Brian Moline spoke with Evan Drellich, a senior writer for The Athletic who covers baseball business issues for the website, about the dispute and how it’s indicative of larger issues for Major League Baseball’s television rights.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Brian Moline: Comcast is not the main cable TV provider here in the St. Louis metro area. But this does affect a large number of customers across the Cardinals broadcast territory. This has to be a pretty big hit for Bally's, right?
Evan Drellich: Yeah, it's bad all around. And Comcast is offering a refund of $8 to $10 to any affected customer. So it's hurting them too. It really is one of these situations where it's hard to see who wins. And you would think the incentive would be for something to get done relatively quickly. I was told yesterday by somebody in baseball, not by somebody directly with either of these groups, that there could be some movement this week, but that we'll see. I mean, that's a secondhand piece of information. And we've seen these things drag on. Last year, Disney and Charter went for longer than anybody wanted, several weeks. So it's really hard to predict how long these things will go.
Moline: But let's talk a little bit more about what Diamond and Comcast are fighting about here. Are we talking about total dollars? Or is there something else involved?
Drellich: It's always total dollars, you know. I cover the business of baseball, it's a lot of off-field matters. And I would say 98% of stories I write, you could end the story with “it's about money.” And I think that's true for any business reporter inside or outside of sports. But the way the total dollars are reflected or show up here, it's kind of interesting. It has to do with tiering. And so what Comcast wants to do is move the Bally RSN’s to a higher premium tier. And what that means is that there will be fewer people who receive the channel and therefore fewer people who are paying for it. And so at the end of the day, the tiering question ends up affecting the total dollars, but that's the vehicle that they're fighting over. And it's a question of how quickly does that change happen? Are any customers grandfathered in? Where if you have it now, without the premium tier, how quickly do they get moved over? So the net dollars are what matter, but it shows up through this mechanism.
Moline: What could the long-term effects here be, not only on a team like the Cardinals who's been pretty successful with their regional cable network (Bally Sports Midwest), but broadcasts for Major League Baseball as a whole? Does this at all speed up maybe a move to some kind of a national streaming product?
Drellich: I think this is part of a much larger issue overall in sports and in media generally. This is part of cord-cutting. It's this evolving television landscape that really is going to drive everything in sports in coming years. You're going to see a lockout in baseball in a couple of years, and one of the central issues will be how much money can teams still squeeze out of television deals? What does the television landscape look like? And so, oddly enough, this dispute between a television channel and a distributor, it's really just kind of the head of the snake here. And it's something that if you're a sports fan, you know, the value of these TV rights and what these teams do with these TV rights is really going to underlie everything in the sports landscape for a number of years to come.
