Breaking: Bally Sports Arizona to Drop Arizona Diamondbacks Games Effective June 30

Another team is departing from the Bally Sports ecosystem of regional sports networks. Court filings reveal that Diamond Sports Group (DSG) is has requested the judge in the case allow it to reject its contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks as of June 30.

The Diamondbacks contract is “significantly unprofitable and is projected to be increasingly unprofitable in subsequent years,” DSGs representatives write in the court filing. This would be the second MLB team to depart Bally Sports channels, after the San Diego Padres saw their broadcasting rights rejected by Diamond at the end of May. The company claims that Bally Sports Arizona, which broadcasts Diamondbacks games, lost $3 million last month alone.

“As a result of this ongoing analysis and other developments, the Debtors have determined, in their business judgment, that the Diamondbacks Agreement is unnecessary and burdensome to the Debtors’ estates and should be rejected,” Diamond’s motion reads.

A hearing has been set for June 29 to determine whether DSG will be allowed to reject its contract with the Diamondbacks or not. There will certainly be no protest from Major League Baseball; the league has been anxious to get all of its broadcasting rights back from Diamond, but so far the company is only interested in letting teams walk whose contracts cost it money instead of bringing in a profit.

Diamond previously tried to argue that because its MLB contracts are worth less now than when they were signed, the company should have to pay less money to the clubs themselves. But Judge Christopher Lopez ruled that argument wouldn't fly in early June, and now DSG is going through all of its contracts to see which it will try to keep.

If Judge Lopez allows DSG to walk from its Diamondbacks contract, MLB will step in to cover games as it did with the Padres. The league almost certainly has agreements already in place to distribute games on cable channels locally, and if Bally Sports Arizona drops the team as of June 30, the next Diamondbacks game to air locally outside that channel will be its July 1 tilt against the Los Angeles Angels. The June 30 contest against the Angels will be exclusively available on “Friday Night Baseball” on Apple TV+.

It will be interesting to see what implications Diamond’s willingness to bid farewell to the Arizona baseball team will have in its dealings with Arizona’s professional basketball teams. Both the Phoenix Suns and Phoenix Mercury see their games broadcast on Bally Sports Arizona, and both teamstried to break away from the channel earlier this year in favor of airing their future contests on local broadcast channels.

DSG objected to that plan, and Judge Lopez blocked the Suns and Mercury from proceeding. It seems as if Diamond’s contracts with those teams are profitable enough for the company to want to keep them, and now they must make their case in court that they deserve to be released from the deals.

Baseball isn’t the only sport in which Diamond is rejecting contracts these days. Last week, the company cut loose from its agreement with the ACC, meaning college football and basketball games that used to appear on its Bally Sports RSNs will have to find a new broadcasting partner. Next up in the line of teams that might see their contracts rejected? That would be the Cleveland Guardians and Minnesota Twins, both of whom are due rights payments by Diamond Sports by July 1.