Colorado Rockies’ CJ Cron, right, jokes with interviewer Ryan Spilborghs after hitting a solo home run against San Diego Padres relief pitcher Daniel Hudson during the ninth inning of a baseball game on Monday, August 16 2021 in Denver.
The Rockies’ progress will be televised. We know it.
But who will broadcast their matches, how fans will watch them, how much fans will pay to watch them, how many fans will watch them and how a new TV deal will affect the club’s finances are major questions.
With spring training just five weeks away, the Rockies and Major League Baseball have yet to reveal a new game plan. A major league source said Friday that an announcement was not imminent. When a plan is reached, it appears MLB will acquire the broadcast rights and produce the games, meaning Rockies games would be available to stream with an MLB.tv subscription.
It remains to be seen whether the Rockies and MLB have found a way to make games accessible to local fans through Comcast, the region’s dominant cable provider.
And while several clubs plan to reduce payroll this season as the television landscape evolves, Rockies general manager Bill Schmidt recently told the Denver Post, “That’s not our plan.”
AT&T SportsNet Mountain Rocky Mountain had been televising Rockies games since 1997, but last March, Warner Brothers Discovery, Inc. (WBD) announced it would do so. stopped paying his Rockies rights, Houston Astros and Pittsburgh Pirates, whose games were broadcast via AT&T SportsNet. Rockies games remained on AT&T SportsNet through the 2023 season, but the regional sports network officially shut down on December 31.
The question is also which advertisers will stay on board. AT&T SportsNet’s on-air talent, including Drew Goodman, Jeff Huson, Ryan Spilborghs, Cory Sullivan and Jenny Cavnar, all independent contractors, were thrown into limbo when AT&T SportsNet shut down. Sources told the Post that there is a good chance the same crew will return to the Rockies’ new broadcast platform in 2024, albeit in a modified and abbreviated format regarding pregame shows and broadcasts. ‘post-match.
Although on-air talent has been kept in the dark for months and not officially informed of their futures, with spring training on the horizon, it’s late in the game to hire a new Rockies broadcast team.
A possible model for the Rockies’ television plan, at least for the upcoming season, can be found in the experience of the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres last season.
Diamond Sports Group, a Sinclair subsidiary that owned Bally Regional Sports Network and held the rights to broadcast games for 14 MLB teams, went through Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings last March. Last May, Diamond Sports Group lost the rights to the Padres after failing to pay them their rights, so MLB came to the rescue and took over the broadcasts.
The league charged Padres fans $19.99 per month — or $74.99 for the rest of the regular season — to watch games on MLB.tv while televising the games on cable through additional channels. In July, MLB stepped in to take over Diamondbacks television broadcasts. When the Padres and D-backs partnered with MLB to offer a direct-to-consumer streaming option, local blackouts for fans on MLB.tv were lifted.
“We are preparing for this revolutionary moment,” Padres CEO Erik Greupner said in a statement last summer. “Our fans will now have unprecedented access to Padres games via digital and traditional platforms in San Diego and beyond.”
With the collapse of regional sports networks (RSN), MLB will have to carry the broadcasting load for more than half of its teams. Before Game 1 of the World Series between the Rangers and Diamondbacks, Commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters that MLB was prepared to take over production and distribution for a number of teams. MLB, however, will not subsidize teams’ TV money like it did last season with Arizona and San Diego.
“We’ll be able to run up to 16 teams next year,” Manfred said, adding that while MLB went through a tough time with the failure of RSNs, he sees a bright future in digital streaming.
“I give you the example of San Diego” he told Sports Illustrated. “We had virtually no notice – I mean, literally hours of notice. We got them back in the middle of a season and, frankly, we got them back when things weren’t going the way a lot of people, especially in San Diego, had hoped.
“And we sold 18,000 season tickets in San Diego. And our ratings on the cable side have remained essentially the same; they were a little better. So what does that tell me? We have an unserved audience, which presents an economic opportunity for us to reach fans we don’t reach.
Last summer, the Padres said their new television plan had the potential — emphasizing the potential — to expand the reach of Padres games from about 1.130 million households to about 3.264 million households on their domestic television territory. The increase of 2.131 million households marked a 189% increase in reach. Of course, this doesn’t mean that all of these fans will buy the product.
The Rockies, however, are not the Padres, an expensive, star-studded club that became a popular team in San Diego even though they underperformed and failed to make the playoffs last season. The Rockies lost a franchise-record 103 games, and although they averaged 32,196 fans per game at Coors Field (ranking 14th in home attendance), their television ratings continued to decline significantly. spectacular.
“With all these losses, the Rockies’ ratings took a big hit last summer,” a source told the Post.
These poor ratings follow the 2022 season in which the Rockies averaged only 15,000 viewers per game, according to Forbes and Nielsen Media. Only the Miami Marlins and Oakland Athletics had worse grades. It’s worth noting, however, that Nielsen ratings don’t capture all viewers who stream games, so the number of fans who watched Rockies games is likely higher.
Still, it’s reasonable to wonder whether disgruntled Rockies fans will be willing to shell out $20 a month to stream games for a team that plans to post a losing record for its sixth straight season.
It’s also reasonable to assume that the Rockies won’t make as much TV money this season as they did last year, when they took in about $57 million in a multiyear deal with AT&T SportsNet that began in 2019. Several other teams have already indicated that they plan to reduce payroll in 2024 as the television situation evolves.
Last May, Manfred testified in bankruptcy court that MLB was willing to subsidize teams abandoned by Diamond Sports Group up to 80% of what they would have earned in 2023. But Manfred said the league would not subsidize not these teams, or any teams, in 2024. He declined to speculate in detail on what that might mean for the future of payroll.
The Minnesota Twins made $54.8 million last season through the now-defunct Bally, and Twins president of baseball operations Derek Falvey acknowledged during general manager meetings in November that The club’s payroll would not be as high in 2024 as it was last season, when the Twins won the AL Central and won a playoff series for the first time since 2002.
According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Twins could reduce their payroll from last year’s record high of $154 million to a range of $125 million to $140 million.
“We’ve pushed our payroll to heights that we’ve never reached before, with the support, certainly, of ownership,” Falvey told reporters. “We know there are natural ebbs and flows in this area. Will it be where it was last year? I don’t expect that. I expected less than that. Some of this might come more organically.
According to Spotrac.com, the Rockies’ total payroll last season was $171 million, ranking 14th in the majors. Their payroll currently stands at $131.2 million (15th). How much that number increases depends on whether the Rockies make any major acquisitions.
Although Schmidt recently said Colorado had no plans to cut its payroll, during last month’s winter meetings he said he was unsure of the club’s finances this season, with the TV deal being in limbo.
“We’ll see,” he said. “I don’t know where we’re going. … We have a payroll, I’m not going to say what it is, but it’s something we have to deal with. It’s true.”
An unlikely alternative solution to the Rockies’ television dilemma would have seen the club partner with Altitude Sports, joining the Nuggets and Avalanche to form a three-team regional sports network.
According to an August report from Journal of sports affairs, Altitude approached the Rockies in hopes that its 162-game schedule would help resolve its dispute with Comcast, owner of Colorado’s dominant cable system in Xfinity. Comcast has not carried Altitude since September 2019. But the Rockies joining Altitude seems unlikely, at least for now.
The future of the Rockies and the majority of MLB teams is this: Teams that don’t have RSN deals (the Dodgers, Cubs and Yankees have their own lucrative networks) will become part of MLB Media. In addition to producing games, the league will attempt to strike deals with local cable companies, sell advertising for those games and return advertising money to the team. These teams’ games will also be available to stream directly to consumers via MLB.tv. Out-of-market season ticket revenue will go to MLB, but in-market season ticket revenue and in-market advertising revenue will go to local clubs.
And while the Rockies’ long-term television plan remains unclear, one thing is clear: The evolution will continue.
Want more Rockies news? Subscribe to the Rockies Insider to get all our MLB analysis.
