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Major League Baseball said Tuesday that it will handle the broadcasts of three more clubs in 2025: the Cleveland Guardians, Milwaukee Brewers and Minnesota Twins.
Those teams were previously carried on Bally-branded regional sports networks operated by Diamond Sports Group, which is in a long-running bankruptcy process.
MLB is now set to produce the broadcasts of six teams in 2025, fully 20 percent of the league and double the number of teams MLB carried last year. The league in 2024 produced the games of the Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies and San Diego Padres, and plans to again carry those teams’ games in 2025, a person briefed on the process who was not authorized to speak publicly said.
The league also announced Tuesday that a fourth team, the Texas Rangers, will also not return to Bally in 2025 and is considering its local media options.
“With the media landscape continuing to evolve, Major League Baseball is committed to serving our fans by ensuring they can see their favorite Clubs, removing blackouts where we can, and ultimately growing the reach of our games,” Noah Garden, MLB’s deputy commissioner overseeing television, said in a media release. “We are proud to bring Guardians, Brewers and Twins games to their passionate fan bases with the same high-quality production that we have demonstrated in Arizona, Colorado, and San Diego.”
Cleveland, Milwaukee and Minnesota games will still be viewable on TV, just like Arizona, Colorado and San Diego games. For the newcomers, MLB will negotiate deals with local cable and satellite distributors, just as a third-party regional sports network would. But the exact channels that the three teams will be carried on in 2025 aren’t known yet.
Overall, though, MLB taking over will indeed help reduce one form of the blackouts that so bother fans. Brewers, Guardians and Twins games will be available via in-market streaming: fans can subscribe to stream games inside their market without having to subscribe to a TV or satellite package.
For Guardians and Twins fans, that’s a new development, while the Brewers previously had an in-market streaming option available via Bally.
In 2024, Diamond carried the games of 12 MLB teams on TV. Five of those teams — including Milwaukee — had also granted Diamond digital in-market streaming rights. But Cleveland and Minnesota did not have a streaming deal with Diamond, in no small part because MLB often did not see eye-to-eye on the value of those rights.
Now, all three teams are going to be available via in-market streaming.
“Last season, the Guardians reach on its RSN was approximately 1.45 million households and the Twins reached approximately 1.08 million homes,” MLB said in Tuesday media’s release. With MLB’s direct-to-consumer streaming option, Cleveland’s games now can reach up to approximately 4.86 million households (plus 235 percent) and Minnesota expands to approximately 4.40 million homes (plus 307 percent).”
MLB did not announce pricing details on Tuesday. The three teams MLB broadcast in 2024 could be streamed for $19.99 a month or $99.99 for the season each, but it’s unknown if that pricing will change.
Handing the broadcasting reins to MLB could mean at least a short-term dip in revenue for the teams that do so compared to what they were paid by established regional sports networks. The trade-off is the increased reach, which over time could lead to improved revenue streams.
“We think that reach is a really important change,” commissioner Rob Manfred said in July. “San Diego is kind of the leader in the clubhouse there, approaching 40,000 subscribers, which is a really good number. Having said that, from a revenue perspective, it is not generating what the RSNs did. The RSNs were a great business, lots of people paid for programming they didn’t necessarily want and it’s hard to replicate that kind of revenue.”
In the big picture, Tuesday’s news helps MLB move toward a spot where it could someday offer a national in-market streaming package, something Manfred said early this year he hoped to do by 2025. But to launch such a package, MLB would need the streaming rights to at least 14 teams, Manfred said at the time, so MLB still isn’t quite halfway there.
But it’s possible MLB could grow the portfolio even further from here in the near term.
Diamond Sports Group broadcast eight other MLB teams last year. In court last week, Diamond said it was dropping the contracts of the Detroit Tigers and Tampa Bay Rays. (Those teams could negotiate new deals, however.)
Diamond also intimated in court that if the Los Angeles Angels, Cincinnati Reds, St. Louis Cardinals, Kansas City Royals and Miami Marlins do not accept renegotiated deals, Diamond will eventually walk away from them as well.
The one team whose current TV contract Diamond last week said in court it intended to keep is the Atlanta Braves.
MLB’s announcement comes one day before another court hearing in the Diamond bankruptcy process, which has been going for more than a year and a half.
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