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On Tuesday morning, Baseball Prospectus published a feature of mine on the Diamond bankruptcy proceedings, and what they meant for the coming MLB offseason. As discussed last month, MLB already pointed out that the trajectory of the bankruptcy saga means impacted teams won’t be able to plan their budgets for the 2025 season, and the addition of another couple of teams — and the threat of more joining them — meant that we were going to be in for another quiet offseason.
On Tuesday afternoon, it was announced that three more teams whose deals with Diamond had been dropped would not seek to renegotiate with the regional sports network… network… and would instead work through MLB to broadcast its games. The league already did this in 2024 with the Diamondbacks, Rockies, and Padres, and they’ll now be joined by the Guardians, Brewers, and Twins. (The Rangers have also separated from Diamond, but they’re going to peddle their wares on their own, without MLB handling things, so they aren’t part of this conversation.)
Given the teams involved, we probably won’t see much of a downturn in spending. The Brewers already cut payroll from 2022 to 2024, and the Twins dropped their own from 2023 to 2024. The Guardians brought their payroll up for 2024, but it was still under $100 million on Opening Day, so don’t get too carried away with excitement there. Trying more and actually trying don’t have to be the same thing and all that. All three clubs will probably spin the wheels a bit for 2025, though, which is not a great thing for fans of any of those clubs. A couple of the Guardians’ four priciest players are hitting free agency, while a whole bunch of others enter a more expensive year of arbitration than the one they’re currently in, including Josh Naylor, who’s set to begin his fourth arbitration-eligible season. The Guardians could get a bit more expensive without getting better, which could lead to inexpensive hole-plugging to compensate. The Twins were already a disappointment, finishing in fourth place with an 82-80 record, and if they aren’t going to make the right investments in that club, 2025 won’t be any easier for them.
The Brewers finished in first in the NL Central, sure, but someone finishes first in that division every year, so let’s not overstate things just because they had a good record and run differential. They probably need more than they’ve got on hand if they’re going to be a real threat in the NL to someone besides the assemblage of regional disappointments they share a space with, but if this rejiggering of their broadcast deal cuts into that, well. You get it.
Combine these clubs — and the others still impacted by Diamond in the sense that they don’t know if they’ll be dropped or not, in the same way the Padres were dropped midseason in 2023 — with the White Sox, who are expected to cut payroll for 2025 after setting the modern record for losses in a season. Combine them with the Diamondbacks, whose owner is maybe trying to goad their most expensive player into not picking up his player option for next summer for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. And the A’s, who maybe would like to actually spend some money this winter, but it’s not known yet if that’s just a thing they’re saying or if anyone will even want to take their money, considering. The point is, we’ve got a huge chunk of the league that is going to lean toward not spending more than they already are, if not actively cutting further, and that’s bad news for the winter.
As far as long-term plans go, the model MLB is using in place of Diamond (or any other RSN provider) is a direct-to-consumer streaming model, which avoids blackouts for games that aren’t national. Revenues are supposedly lower through this setup, since teams lose out on the passive income that came from people who don’t even watch sports still having to pay for the channels that aired them through their cable bill, but MLB wants to address that in the future by creating their own package deals that would, in theory, engage additional customers.
I’m not sure about the long-term viability of such a plan — cutting out the middleman can definitely be a positive, but if the overall fan interest isn’t there, that’s a problem for revenues, one MLB would try to solve by raising prices to make up for the lack of overall customers, in the same way literally every other streaming service operates eventually. The safer play is probably aligning themselves with Amazon in the long run — Amazon wanted to invest in Diamond, remember, but MLB wouldn’t allow it. Most likely because Amazon helping to revive Diamond would have made it more difficult for MLB to re-secure the rights they’d contracted out to Diamond in the first place. Whether Amazon is eventually where MLB ends up remains to be seen, however. The thing about trying to do this on their own in these smaller batches is that they can get a feel for what works and what doesn’t, and also back out at any time. These are the teams’ local broadcast rights, yes, not MLB’s, but something can surely be worked out here where MLB gets to direct where the future for teams resides, while teams get to still have rights of their own to negotiate elsewhere if they choose. TV and streaming are separate entities, and all, at least to a degree.
If it wasn’t clear, this is all messy, and a lot of it is up in the air and hypothetical. This streaming-heavy future is a new frontier, even for the league that was selling a streaming option so long ago that the technology itself ended up being used as the basis for multiple other companies’ streaming services.
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