Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Newsletter Excerpt, December 10, 2024 -- "The TV Gap, In Practice"

This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.

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If you take a step back from the details, you can divide MLB teams into two categories: Stable TV situations and unstable ones. Even the Diamond teams only have deals in the short term, and Diamond has proven itself to be a poor partner over any time frame. There are eleven teams I would describe as having stable, profitable TV situations: the Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Orioles, Mets, Nationals, Cubs, and Dodgers are on networks built around those teams. Three other teams -- the A’s, Giants, and Phillies -- are partnered with Comcast and seem to be stable. The A’s made Sacramento their temporary home in no small part so as to retain their local-TV deal.

Now, we’re just a few weeks into the 2024-25 offseason, so what follows is a snapshot, but I think it may be an illustrative one. So far, there have been a dozen contract commitments of at least $15 million. Those break down as follows:

11 stable teams: nine signings, $1.365 billion
19 unstable teams: three signings, $156 million