The bankrupt Diamond Sports Group, which holds the 2024 broadcast rights to 11 Major League Baseball teams through its Bally-branded regional sports networks, appears to be nearing a settlement with baseball’s commissioner’s office that could create relative certainty as to which MLB teams Diamond will broadcast next year.
“We are in a position to believe that we have a framework to move forward,” said James Bromley, a lawyer for MLB, during a federal bankruptcy hearing in Houston. “We have a lot of conditions and issues that we still need to work through.”
The next hearing is set for Jan. 10. Such a deal, if consummated, would likely also add clarity to those 11 teams’ television revenues, at least for the 2024 season. The Diamond drama looms in the background of free agency, if not over it, particularly now as the market moves beyond Shohei Ohtani, who was never going to lack for suitors.
The teams that remain under contract with Diamond for 2024 are the Los Angeles Angels, Milwaukee Brewers, Atlanta Braves, St. Louis Cardinals, Cleveland Guardians, Miami Marlins, Texas Rangers, Tampa Bay Rays, Cincinnati Reds, Kansas City Royals and Detroit Tigers.
Lawyers for Diamond and MLB did not specify in court what the framework they’re building would look like, or whether it would include all 11 remaining teams. MLB and Diamond declined to comment after the hearing.
Both Cleveland and Texas are known as teams that Diamond has considered dropping unless a revised financial arrangement could be reached. Those two teams had lawyers in court Friday.
“The Guardians are supportive of what’s being proposed today,” said Oliver Zeltner, who represents the team. “We haven’t been involved in the mediation, but what we’ve heard today is encouraging.”
A lawyer for Diamond, Andrew Goldman, added a new wrinkle, however, when he mentioned that there are “three teams who are currently not contemplated to be in the fold.” Previously there were only two such known teams — the Guardians and Rangers. The identity of that third team was not immediately clear.
A lawyer for the Rangers, Charles Koster, added there are “three teams that debtors will be seeking to change the financial arrangement with.”
The third team might be a club previously carried by Diamond that is not currently, which would include the Arizona Diamondbacks, San Diego Padres or Minnesota Twins.
Koster also said that the parties were making an effort “to get to a broad and global deal with all of the MLB teams and MLB itself.”
“That said, obviously, as we all know, there is not a deal until there’s a deal, and there’s also not necessarily a common set of issues among all of the clubs,” Koster said.
Some player agents this offseason have privately pointed out that potentially affected teams appear to have tightened their wallets on account of the uncertainty surrounding Diamond and the Bally stations, and some team executives have made at least indirect comments reinforcing as much. That stance, in turn, has irked agents who believe the teams are overhyping concern for TV revenue.
Diamond was supposed to square off with MLB on Friday. The league had asked the court for Diamond to decide which teams it would or would not carry for 2024. But the parties made enough progress in a long mediation meeting Thursday that the sides asked for the hearing to be pushed to January to further settlement talks.
The adjournment could help the parties “see if we can have peace break out in the valley,” said Goldman, the Diamond lawyer.
“It’s a particularly complicated set of bullet points that we’re going to try to reduce,” he said.
The larger question might be what will happen after 2024. By that time, Diamond is likely to have a Chapter 11 reorganization plan in place, one that could well return any baseball TV rights Diamond still holds for 2025 and beyond to the respective teams. So even if Diamond can broadcast the remaining 11 teams for 2024, its current partner teams are likely to be looking for different partners for 2025 — whether that’s MLB distributing games itself or another third party.
Entering 2023, Diamond carried 14 MLB teams. Diamond stopped making rights fee payments to the Padres and Diamondbacks during the 2023 season, and MLB took over those broadcasts. Diamond’s deal with the Twins expired after last season.
Other teams face near-term TV uncertainty as well. The Colorado Rockies are not known to have a TV home for 2024 yet after Warner Bros. Discovery got out of the RSN business.
(Photo of Bally Sports broadcasters Patrick O’Neal and Mark Gubicza interviewing Ron Washington on Nov. 15: Kirby Lee / USA Today)
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