Quote:
Originally Posted by Marcellus
Who thought this was a great business model? Its insanity.
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Nobody.
Bally Sports got bought by Sinclair Media and Sinclair promptly drove it into a MFing mountain.
This was wholly a product of the Fox Sport group getting purchased and parted out. And I don't imagine MLB expected that to happen. The Regional Sports Networks were a perfect solution for baseball - baseball is largely a regional sport. The teams get followed by their local fanbase but it hasn't generated a true 'national' market for probably 50 years. There are just too damn many games played for folks to care about any single game on a Thursday where they don't have a rooting interest.
But the RSNs addressed that perfectly and brought a level of access that was largely unprecedented. What we have now is somehow STILL better than what we had in, say, 1997. But it's certainly a roll-back of 25 years of progress on that front.
It's a mess. But at least as it relates to this specific mess, I'm not positive there was anything else that MLB could've done.