Bally Sports in jeopardy as MLB seeks to force payment for Guardians & Twins

Bally Sports’ parent-company, Diamond Sports Group has entered bankruptcy, but it still has not paid the MLB for the rights for many of its teams that it broadcasts. Including the Cleveland Guardians and Minnesota Twins. Now, the MLB has filed an emergency motion to force DSG to either pay the rights fees that the MLB is owed, or to forfeit its rights to those two teams.

Bally Sports Great Lakes and Bally Sports North continue to broadcast the games, even though DSG has not paid the teams what is owed to them.

The filing from the MLB shows that by April 13 Diamond either needs to fork over the cash, or fork over their rights to those two teams. The final payment to the Guardians is actually due tomorrow, April 8. However if DSG does miss that payment, it would kick off a 10-day grace period that is built into the contract. But judging by this filing and the language in it, the MLB is running out of patience.

More teams could follow

Other teams that DSG broadcasts – Arizona Diamondbacks, Detroit Tigers, Milwaukee Brewers, Tampa Bay Rays and the Texas Rangers – are noted in the filing, that if DSG doesn’t make their payments to them in the future, that they could join the Guardians and Twins.

MLB’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, has stated before that the league is prepared to take over the broadcasting of these games, if DSG does not pay them the money they are owed.

So why is the MLB simply not taking their rights back from Bally Sports and other RSNs? Well, money. These RSNs pay the league and its teams a handsome amount of money to broadcast these games. And if the MLB took them back, they would lose out on that money. For instance, the Kansas City Royals are getting paid $52 million per year from Bally Sports. And that’s a relatively small market.

Because of the drama with RSNs, not just Bally Sports, but also AT&T SportsNet, the MLB has started to air some games for certain teams on MLB.TV in-market. And on opening day, MLB.TV saw a record viewership. Having a total of 172 million minutes streamed on the service. If the RSNs go away, those numbers could be dwarfed in a short amount of time.