Local broadcasters are crucial for MLB. Now many are in trouble

Tucker Carlson didn’t stand a chance. In the battle for eyeballs in St Louis, the Fox News provocateur could never own primetime like Albert Pujols.

St Louis Cardinals games during the beloved slugger’s farewell season last summer were watched by more than four times as many viewers in the MLB team’s home city as the next-most popular cable show, Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News.

That points to the enduring popularity of local broadcasts in baseball hotbeds – but with the new MLB season only a few days old there is off-field turmoil sparked by the bankruptcy of America’s leading regional sports network.

The product may well be more attractive this year thanks to the rules tweaks, but how many armchair fans will be watching? Broadcasting baseball is becoming more complex and contentious as the television industry is buffeted by turbulence in the streaming and cord-cutting era. The way viewers consume sports is changing, disrupting a business model that for decades turbocharged team revenues and player salaries.

Diamond Sports, which runs 19 regional networks under the Bally Sports brand, filed for bankruptcy in March, threatening the live game broadcasts of 42 major league teams – 14 from MLB, including the Cardinals, 16 from the NBA and 12 in the NHL – as well as $2bn in combined annual rights fees, about half of which goes to baseball.

What’s more, Warner Bros Discovery has been seeking to exit the regional sports network (RSN) arena and shut down its AT&T SportsNet channels, affecting seven teams, including the World Series champion Houston Astros.

The NBA and NHL regular seasons are about to end so they are less impacted and have plenty of time to work out a solution before the next campaign. And local deals are