MLB on TV means everything and nothing
MLB on TV means everything and nothing
Part 2 of “Toward a Better Baseball”
During MLB’s 2023 offseason, I am posting a series of essays titled “Toward a Better Baseball.” The goal of the series is to articulate a vision for the sport for when MLB loses its monopoly power. This is Part 2. You can read Part 1 here.
FCC regulations, case law, business operations, market variations, evolving technology, and consumer preferences become absurd after remembering that we’re just smashed-together particles of space dust. Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption allows for frequent and infuriating television blackouts—so what? Those are made-up things, there are bigger problems in the world, and in the end our fates are sealed.
We need to spend our time on earth somehow, though, and few things are as fun and fulfilling and elicit as much passion and pain as sports. If baseball is essential to community, as I’ve argued in the first piece of this series, then MLB’s TV broadcasts are an obvious corollary to that. The 2023 World Series was the least-watched ever. I suspect that matters none to the 9.1 million people who cheered on the Texas Rangers or the Arizona Diamondbacks or, like me, hate-watched both of them.
This sort of existential tug-of-war is waged daily by mere mortals. It’s a minor trifle to MLB’s thirty team owners, for they don’t believe in anything. An indication of this is the league’s broadcast policies. Teams sell broadcast rights individually and exclusively, which makes baseball on TV expensive and often inaccessible. There is no apparent rationale to it, not even in the Corporate Values kind of way, other than that it’s every man, literally, for himself for the most profit possible. This status quo benefits no one—not the fans, not the players, and not even the owners who do everything in their power to maintain it.
To watch every Phillies or Padres game last season, I would have needed a television subscription that carried the right mix of channels, as games sprawled across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, FOX, FS1, TBS, and MLB Network. I also would have needed subscriptions to MLB.TV, the league’s out-of-market broadcast service; the Padres’ dedicated stream, after Bally Sports San Diego’s parent company filed for bankruptcy; and Apple TV+ and Peacock. My financial advisor had concerns, but it was my therapist who talked me out of it.
It may be better to pay, say, $300 for a singular baseball channel devoid of blackouts rather than maintain five separate subscriptions, but the media landscape is always changing and not many people are demented enough to watch baseball every day for six months. In whatever way MLB is beamed into my eyeballs, I wouldn’t understand what I’m paying for since I don’t know where MLB is going.
Is MLB’s vision for baseball to be once again the most popular sport in America? Or even the world? The Athletic’s profile of MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred reported his vision as “One Baseball,” and listed some initiatives completed or underway to achieve that, including consolidated youth programs and media operations. That’s as riveting as baseball was before the pitch timer, and I have no idea what that means for me as a fan or for the sport. MLB also refuses to let go its stranglehold on where baseball can be played in the United States. With how expensive and confusing it is to find a ballgame on TV, the league’s goal seems to be to make the sport as unappealing and inaccessible as possible.
Do MLB’s expensive broadcasts result in the best possible game product, then? That can’t be, not with MLB’s revenue sharing model all but guaranteeing profits for teams who refuse to invest in their rosters and the league’s “Competitive Balance Tax” penalizing teams that do. CBS Sports’ Dayn Perry described the management of the Oakland Athletics as “malpractice,” but MLB not only enabled but also rewarded owner Bruce Fisher, who last season assembled one of the worst and cheapest baseball teams ever and let the Oakland Coliseum go to seed.
It’s no better at the top of the standings. The Los Angeles Dodgers could cover their player payroll with the revenue from their TV contract alone, according to one estimate by Fangraphs, nevermind revenues from gate receipts, concessions, merchandise, licensing, advertising, and so on. Inflation apparently doesn’t exist for billionaires. The team’s opening day player payroll in 2019 was $206 million. Four years and a pandemic later, it was $210.6 million, representing a paltry 2.23% increased investment in the roster. The Competitive Balance Tax is, in fact, an anti-labor tool that punishes the players and in turn the fans who want their teams to be good. It also protects the owners from what they hate the most: competition. With no consequence for losing and few incentives to win, MLB is committed to a game and future full of mediocrity.
Does MLB just want to make its existing fans happy? In spite of itself, MLB is more popular than ever by some metrics, and the league set a revenue record in 2022 and will likely do so again this year. I believe these are good things, but they don’t necessarily translate to a positive fan experience. It’s expensive and confusing to watch games, it’s expensive to go to a game, and investment in team rosters vis-à-vis the players had stagnated for years. (In the 2022 offseason, the owners locked out the players hoping to gain leverage in labor negotiations. It didn’t work. The players’ solidarity resulted in significant pay bumps and teams being more likely to play young, exciting players.) Worst of all, Manfred called the World Series trophy just a “piece of metal,” as if winning it isn’t all we care about. But fret not, fellow peasants, MLB saw a “38% increase in [social media] followers” in 2023!
As a comparison, the NFL realized early that it’s hard to devote yourself to a sport or team you can’t watch, so in the 1960s the league began making its games accessible on network television. More than sixty years later, fans still don’t need a subscription to watch the NFL. Just buy a $20 digital antenna for a TV and on Sundays tune into the local CBS, Fox, and NBC affiliates.
Money was at the heart of the NFL’s decision, but so was a discernible mission: to become the most popular sports league in the United States. I believe that mission resonates with fans, wittingly or not. Plugging into the NFL feels essential, as something central and inevitable, so it’s exciting on a cultural level, even for people who don’t particularly care for the minutiae. The only American athlete good enough—important enough—to date Taylor Swift is a football player. Foundational to this cultural relevance is accessibility.
Phoenix Suns owner Mat Ishbia gets this. His deal to purchase the Suns was finalized in December 2022 and only a few months later the team announced it was ditching its exclusive broadcaster to show games for free over-the-air. “It might cost the teams money in the short term,” wrote Ken Belson and Tania Ganguli for the New York Times, “but the bet was that it would help them reach more fans, including those who dropped their cable subscriptions or, like many younger fans, never had one.”
The Suns were first to make the leap, but leagues and teams across sports are reevaluating their relationships with TV as the exclusive broadcasting model falters. To MLB’s credit, Manfred wants to eliminate blackouts and the league is inching toward that. Like the Padres, the Diamondbacks offered a dedicated stream last year after their exclusive TV broadcaster went bankrupt and the Minnesota Twins are poised to end blackouts next season. The difference from the Suns is MLB remains intent on sticking it to its fans. For cord cutters and those without the right TV package, the Padres’ and Diamondbacks’ streams each cost $19.99-per-month.
All roads lead back to MLB’s antitrust exemption. It allows the thirty team owners to carve up the United States into media markets, which enables the teams to sell exclusive broadcast rights individually and be the only professional baseball on TV in a given geographic area. This is what makes the Los Angeles’ media market, the second-largest in the U.S., so lucrative for the Dodgers. They charge so much for and limit their TV product because they can, and now they’re addicted to the resulting fees. Manfred can’t banish blackouts league-wide because team owners in large television markets make a monopolistic mint through their long-term broadcast contracts.
It doesn’t matter to MLB that the NFL sells its broadcast rights collectively as a league and makes far more revenue per team. It doesn’t matter to MLB that rising costs for fans don’t result in greater investments in their favorite teams. It doesn’t matter to MLB that making their TV product more affordable and accessible could bring in new fans or bring back old ones or help out poorer ones. The most important thing to MLB owners is maintaining their monopoly. They think it’s a blessing when it’s the thing holding baseball back the most.
Of course, most of us fans have more in life to worry about than the antitrust exemption. We just want to put our team on TV and with the people we care about believe, at least for a moment, that the outcome of a game is the most important thing on earth, and that those moments will keep coming because you and I are going to live forever. It’s a delusion, but one that is more necessary and far more fulfilling than the owners’ delusion that they can take their billions with them into the next life.