Tag: Diamond

Notes: Diamond’s plan approved, MLBPA licensing change, Rays have 2025 home

Diamond isn’t going anywhere for the next few years, but the Rays are.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Thanks to the judge’s decision on Thursday, Diamond will emerge from bankruptcy court with a plan to keep their regional sports broadcasting business going. There are quite a few details to go over, with more to come, but I’d like a little more time to mull over What It All Means before diving into all of that. So, today, let’s just look at some basics.

Diamond will continue to broadcast seven MLB teams, far fewer than it used to, and all on deals that were restructured to varying degrees. The Cardinals, for instance, worked out a new deal, but will see about a 25 percent drop in annual revenue compared to where they were before. Part of that likely had to do with their severe drop in viewership over the past couple of seasons, though, we’ve already discussed one solution for that. The Braves stayed on the same deal, but granted streaming rights to Diamond. The Royals could still rejoin Diamond, but at this point the two sides are still negotiating.

Continue reading “Notes: Diamond’s plan approved, MLBPA licensing change, Rays have 2025 home”

Notes: The A’s don’t seem more Vegas-bound yet, Diamond’s future

The A’s aren’t clarifying how this relocation is going to work over time. Instead, it’s only being further muddled.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

On November 30, Baseball Prospectus published a piece of mine titled “The A’s Move to Vegas is Approved, Not Assured.” The idea being that MLB had given permission for the Athletics to vacate Oakland and head to Las Vegas, but beyond that, all that was in place was Vegas allowing it to happen, too. There were a number of ways this relocation could fall apart, and the two-plus months since this piece ran have not reduced that number, either.

On top of that, 2024 kicked off with a look at how the A’s still haven’t provided the stadium renderings that they had promised in early December, and the excuses they used for the delay, both directly and indirectly, no longer exist. So what gives?

Continue reading “Notes: The A’s don’t seem more Vegas-bound yet, Diamond’s future”

On MLB’s rejection of the Amazon/Diamond streaming proposal

MLB’s rejection is also them showing their hand on their preference for the future of broadcasting.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

You saw the headline, now let’s get to some background. From me on December 22, at Baseball Prospectus:

Continue reading “On MLB’s rejection of the Amazon/Diamond streaming proposal”

Round-up: Diamond bankruptcy, WBC pitchers, cheap owners

Diamond finally declares bankruptcy, Team USA is struggling with pitching restrictions, and Bomani Jones has something to say to MLB’s cheap owners.

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

We’ve got a few things to catch up on, so let’s hit the ground running.

Diamond declares bankruptcy

We knew it was going to happen eventually, but Diamond, the owners of Bally Broadcasting, which serves as the regional broadcasting network for a not insignificant number of MLB’s teams, declared bankruptcy. That sounds scary on the surface, but as I wrote about a few weeks back, it’s more of a sign of things to come than it is a notice of an interruption of how you consume baseball in 2023. Here’s Sportico’s Brendan Coffey with an explanation and quotes:

Continue reading “Round-up: Diamond bankruptcy, WBC pitchers, cheap owners”