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I would submit that the vast majority of fans can still find Bally Sports Midwest if they want. Stray games on Apple or elsewhere would not affect BSM’s ratings, which measure how many tune in the games they are broadcasting.
I’m in Nashville and can’t get Midwest – only Southeast and not even that anymore as I have Comcast / Xfinity.
The whole RSN setup has become archaic and tiresome.
Everytime we turn around someone is extracting more money from us to watch sports.
Anytime a pro team gets a new stadium it’s at least partially built with public money and then PSLs / ticket prices / parking / concessions / etc. double in price.
The average working man or woman can’t afford it so many of the seats go to corporate customers.
Taking a family of 4 to a ballgame with ‘good’ seats will run you in excess if $400 all-in. Much more if you aren’t local.
Thanks for explaining, ZTR. Southeast does have all the games, but only in certain areas (that are in the Cardinals market). Your provider doesn’t carry them.
It is a sorry mess, indeed.
(updated for clarity)
That is well put ZTR. I would have had to step out of line anyway, as to both attendance and viewing, so the current doings, and potential future doings, does not have any negative impact on me. I do think that it is just the current iteration of what has been going on for a long time. It is obvious to me that the strategy as to extracting dollars from pockets, whether attendance costs, viewership costs, concessions, taxpayer subsidies, or whatever is to stick it to the public until there is a revolt and then back off slightly. There has not been any effective revolt so far, so they continue to push ahead. They are businessmen so I don’t blame them. People will pay up so why shouldn’t they. It is absurd that the 30 owners should continue to be exempt from anti trust laws, but that is a subject which persistently fails to get traction for some reason.
Even when Bally was a full go, in the Nashville area they showed either Cincinnati or Atlanta games on their Southeast channel.
We are about 4 hours from Atlanta, 5 hours from Cincy, and 5 1/2 hours from StL. Nashville would indeed fill a ‘hole’ and be a good location for an MLB expansion franchise. As a Cardinal fan, I got spoiled living in Memphis where we had the Cards AAA team and StL was about a 4 hour drive once the speed limit went up to 70 on I-55 and Bally Midwest was available.
Midwest carries the Cardinal’s games and that channel was not available here not even as an add on or a higher tier package.
Extra Innings was the answer but with Bally financially imploding there are more and more games not available (on Comcast / Xfinity).
ZTR, you aren’t the poster Skinnypimp with a new handle are you? I didn’t post much for a couple years but I missed that guy and he was out of Memphis.
Nashville is Cubs and Braves territory so the BSM feed is not available there. However, being out of market, you should be able to see all Cardinals games on MLB.TV, correct?
Key point for this discussion is that you didn’t lose anything in 2024 that you had in 2023. So your access (or lack of it) is not a reason for the ratings drop.
(I do get the RSM and blackout frustration and have written critically about it for years, back to the Selig days.)
I am not Skinnypimp, lol.
Since these games are in Atlanta I cannot watch these games due to the Bally blow up.
The Cardinal and Atlanta Extra Innings channel just show a we’re sorry message.
Some few years ago I was on a flight and sitting next to guy who had retired from one of the big three broadcasting networks. He had been in the finance end of it and said his experience was dated as he’d been retired 10 years. We talked about televising baseball. He said that you have an Oakland vs Miami game that about 8 people will watch and will bring in little revenue, vs a NY vs Boston which will bring in a lot. But the production costs of both will be similar. Advertisers will have no interest in one and a lot in the other. You have to force them to take what they don’t want in order to get what they do want. And the profit from the whole this has to pop out the end and be distributed in certain proportions. He said it was a mess, but the dollar figures were unbelievably huge.
There’s a name (Skinnypimp) out of the past. Just as what will happen to us here, we will slowly, but unfortunately, surely, simply vanish one day from this board. Many times it will the case of heading on up to that big diamond in the sky and other times for whatever reason, the poster hangs em up here at The Cardinal Nation. I wonder what happened to the likes of AustinCardinal, PhilSkill, JModene, Mags, DuckyMedwick, U-Fan and a host of others. I hear from DizzyDean17 every blue moon and know he spends much time each summer traveling from ballpark to ballpark with his cool brother Reggie.
Remembering that conversation I referenced above got me reminiscing. The guy recounted how, as a young man working for the network, he got to meet Casey Stengel. The occasion was Casey was back in New York for an event related to them getting ready to demolish Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. That in turn made me remember that my dad had said Ebbets Field, right near where he had lived for a while in the Flatbush neighborhood, being torn down is what gave him the idea to set off with 5 or 6 year old me and drive 1,000 miles to see one of the last baseball games ever played at the Polo Grounds during the Mets final season there. I do actually have some vague memories of that, and of my mother being beside herself. She was so worked up that her father agreed to go along on the trip to calm her nerves and ‘keep us out of trouble’.
Nashville is Cubs and Braves territory so the BSM feed is not available there.
Nashville is Cubs territory? Why? Nashville is much closer to St. Louis and Cincinnati than it is to Chicago.
The games I used to get on Bally Southeast were the Braves and the Reds both of whom were not renewed by Bally’s during their ‘restructuring’. That coupled with my internet and cable carrier (Xfinity) not being able to renew with Bally’s means I pretty much wasted my $150 on Extra Innings this year.
Next year I will just go with MLB.com and pay them about the same thing.
Hopefully MLB pulls its head out of its rear end regarding all the blackouts and non-availability caused by regional sports networks so this crap never happens to this extent again.
Can you say archaic and outdated?
Folks in Nashville are lucky. Iowa claimed as territory by SIX different teams. As ZTR said, “archaic and outdated”.
But don’t hold your breath. I have a Selig quote from 2006 in which he said they would figure out how to fix the blackouts.
Blackouts allow them to extract more money, why would they want to “fix” it? They don’t. If people stop paying they will come up with something else, which will cost more, but the blackouts will be “fixed”.
It has a mention of the current MLB deal but not sure how this agreement with the NBA and NHL ties in with that.
There is no MLB deal yet. A big difference between them and the NBA/NHL is that the other leagues have a overarching agreement, while MLB is team by team. That is why some MLB teams fell out previously.
What MLB really wants is to take the streaming over themselves so if they keep the price high, they can hope Diamond can’t afford it.
Wonder if this changes Bally’s stance with MLB …
https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2024/08/26/amazon-diamond-sports-group
Is this going to affect offseason spending — again?
Not to bum you out, but … probably. A handful of owners, at least, might once again cite it as a reason for not spending as much as their fans would like.
Teams guaranteed $3.05 billion to major league free agents last offseason, down from $3.92 billion the year before that and $3.3 billion the year before that, according to ESPN’s calculations.
The Texas Rangers — at that point in danger of falling out of an RSN deal that would pay them somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million before settling on a lesser one-year contract with Diamond — went conservative in the wake of a championship. The San Diego Padres — the first team Diamond dropped last season, prompting MLB to take over broadcasts — brought their payroll down by about 35%. The Seattle Mariners — whose RSN, Root Sports, was placed on a more expensive tier by Comcast — basically kept payroll flat. And big-name free agents such as Blake Snell, Matt Chapman, Cody Bellinger and Jordan Montgomery — all Scott Boras clients at the time — signed unusually late.
That’s a precursor to what might happen again this offseason. Whether it’s a valid reason depends on whom you speak with. Local media represents about 20% of team revenues in the aggregate, and not being able to count on that will naturally impact spending for some clubs. But many are quick to push back on that notion, noting that there are other avenues where teams can make up for losses, including: the distribution of luxury tax payments, with MLB’s portion expected to reach up to $150 million this year; a growth in central revenue largely from national TV deals that are still in their early stages; and revenue from uniform patches that did not exist until last year.
As an added layer of protection, MLB and the MLB Players Association agreed in July on what amounts to a reallocation of the money generated from luxury tax overages this offseason, giving teams that experienced losses in local-media revenue up to $15 million. Will that make a difference in owners’ actions? That remains to be seen. If not, it’ll be another offseason defined by the clubs that, at least for now, have secure media deals and those who don’t, further widening the gap between big- and small-market teams.
This could be huge for the Cardinals being able to offer direct to consumer viewing:
Assuming there is a direct to the consumer option for streaming Cardinals games next season, how much would you be willing to pay or what do you think would be fair?
Spring training through the end of the season is 8 months. $25/mo for that period would be $200 or about $1 per game.
I personally would be willing to pay that. I’m not sure where my maximum would be.
Disclaimer, I live in an area where I can’t get Bally Midwest and am also in the blackout area so I have only been able to watch about 5 games per season the last 3 years.
Assuming there is a direct to the consumer option for streaming Cardinals games next season, how much would you be willing to pay or what do you think would be fair?
Spring training through the end of the season is 8 months. $25/mo for that period would be $200 or about $1 per game.
I personally would be willing to pay that. I’m not sure where my maximum would be.
The current cost for a single team package on MLB.tv is $120 a year. It’s $140 for all teams. I would expect it to come in around those numbers.
As for what I’d pay, I had a subscription for a few full years from around 2017 to 2019. Then would just wait until Memorial Day or so for a few years. I didn’t subscribe for 2023. My wife gets a free subscription so I used that. If the team was exciting, I’d probably pay $60 to watch a half year. But baseball isn’t much of a line item in my budget anymore.
It might take fans no longer caring too much about whether or not they have a way to watch. Then, maybe MLB with see to it that the games are bit more accessible. Although we still have cable, I’m watching the Tigers/Astros game on ABC right now. I’m sure most can recall when all of the playoff games were accessible with a TV equipped with an antenna. I miss Gowdy, Garagiola, Kubek, K. Jackson and even Howard…Haha!
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