Where Do MLB, Bally Sports Stand Ahead of 2024 Opening Day?

Baseball fans from coast to coast are gearing up for the start of the 2024 MLB season. Opening Day is set for Thursday, March 28, and this year will see an even dozen teams play most of their games on a Bally Sports-branded regional sports network (RSN). Bally Sports’ parent company Diamond Sports Group (DSG) is still in bankruptcy proceedings, but in March it filed a reorganization plan that will potentially see it exit bankruptcy and emerge as a going concern. MLB’s eagerness to reclaim all of its rights from Diamond and change its relationship with RSNs has been clear for months, but where do things stand between the two organizations ahead of the 2024 season?

• In 2024, 12 MLB teams will see their games broadcast in local markets on Bally Sports channels.
• The rights to the Cleveland Guardians, Minnesota Twins, and Texas Rangers revert back to MLB at year’s end, but the other nine teams on Bally Sports channels will not.
• Diamond still holds the streaming rights to just five MLB clubs, but each is locked into a long-term deal with the company.

There’s a lot to keep track of when discussing Diamond’s current relationship with Major League Baseball, but The Streamable’s experts have been tracking the story since before Diamond entered bankruptcy last year. We’ll break down where things stand between MLB and Bally Sports channels in 2024, and beyond.

For a stretch of several months in late 2023, it appeared that DSG was getting its affairs in order to shut down operations after the end of the 2024 MLB season. The company made deals with the NBA and NHL to send the broadcast rights of the teams from those leagues owned by Diamond Sports back to the leagues themselves after the conclusion of the 2023-24 seasons. But then Amazon swooped in with the promise of a big investment, and Diamond’s creditors were encouraged that the company could actually emerge from bankruptcy as a viable business.

On the MLB side, Diamond holds long-term deals with nine teams: the Atlanta Braves, Cincinnati Reds, Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, Los Angeles Angels, Miami Marlins, Milwaukee Brewers, St. Louis Cardinals and Tampa Bay Rays. Three other teams agreed to short-term deals ahead of the 2024 season which will see them take less in broadcasting fees than they would have collected from DSG originally, but will also see them get their rights back at the end of the season. These teams are the Cleveland Guardians, Minnesota Twins and Texas Rangers. In all, this means that Bally Sports RSNs — or whichever company wins naming rights to the channels after 2024, when Diamond’s deal with Bally will expire — will continue to carry at least nine teams past the 2024 season if Diamond emerges from bankruptcy as planned.

Not much has changed on the streaming side of the equation, however. The Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers, Miami Marlins, and Tampa Bay Rays are the only five teams on Bally Sports channels that also appear on Bally Sports+, just like last year. MLB has been adamant that no more teams sell their streaming rights to Diamond; commissioner Rob Manfred wants to launch an in-market streaming service that carries around half the teams in the league by 2025, but he’ll have a hard time getting to the number of clubs he wants without the five teams that now stream on Bally Sports+. The trouble for Manfred is that all five of those teams have long-term contracts with DSG in place, currently.

If Diamond gets its bankruptcy reorganization plan approved, MLB will have to continue battling the company. The league will see broadcast rights to nine teams stay with DSG after the 2024 season, including all five of the teams that currently sell their in-market streaming rights to the company.

Where Do Other Leagues Stand with Diamond?

As noted above, the NBA and NHL both signed short-term deals with Diamond that would allow them to reclaim their broadcast rights in exchange for lower fee payments in the 2023-24 season. However, the restructuring agreement submitted to Judge Christopher Lopez in late February negated these deals, stipulating that “none of the NBA or NHL team rights agreements shall be subject to early termination.”

According to Sportico, Diamond says it is still trying to communicate with the leagues “with respect to modifications to their existing telecast rights agreements.” But as of now, the 15 NBA teams and 11 NHL teams currently signed on to broadcast their games on a Bally Sports channel in the future seem locked into those contracts.

Which MLB Teams Play on a Bally Sports Channel?

Check out a chart of which teams are available on Bally Sports networks below. DIRECTV STREAM and Fubo are the two live TV streaming services that carry Bally Sports channels in the markets where they’re broadcast.