Bally Sports

Bally Sports is a grouping of 21 regional cable television networks owned by the Diamond Sports Group, a joint venture of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. At the start of 2023, Bally Sports was the rights holder for the local broadcasts of 14 teams in Major League Baseball, in addition to teams in the NBA, the NHL and the WNBA.

The group was constituted in 2019 when the Disney Corporation was forced by the United States Department of Justice to divest itself of a number of the holdings of 21st Century Fox as a condition for the approval of its acquisition of the conglomerate. The decision was made under antitrust legislation in order to prevent Disney from concentrating too much power in the sports broadcasting industry, since it already owned ESPN and affiliated networks. Most of the properties thus acquired by Diamond Sports were formerly branded as part of the Fox Sports network. The official launch of the network under the new name took place on March 31, 2021.

The name Bally Sports comes from a branding agreement with Bally's Corporation, a casino operator that was getting heavily into the newly-legalized sports betting industry at the time. This is ironical as for years, MLB wanted nothing to do with casino operators, with Commissioner Bowie Kuhn deciding to ban two iconic former players, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, for accepting jobs as greeters for Bally casinos in the early 1980s (the decision was later reversed by Kuhn's successor, Peter Ueberroth).

The purchase of the networks was heavily leveraged, and initial revenue forecasts were not met, in large part because of the decline of the cable television industry in the United States through the phenomenon known as "cord-cutting", and the arrival of new players who drove up the cost of acquiring broadcast rights. This resulted in the Diamond Sports Group failing to make an interest payment of $140 million on February 15, 2023 and asking for a grace period of 30 days. Failing to make the payment within that time frame would likely result in the company filing for bankruptcy, creating a period of unprecedented uncertainty in the sports broadcasting industry. Commissioner Rob Manfred immediately stepped in to reassure fans that MLB was already making contingency plans: teams would immediately terminate their agreements if Bally Sports was unable to perform its part of the contract, and broadcasts of the games would be made available to consumers in the affected markets, either for streaming or through other cable networks, with the league producing those broadcasts itself. In the longer term however, the creation of the conglomerate had been a financial windfall for MLB and its teams, and a bankruptcy would almost certainly lead to lowered revenues, something Manfred was quick to acknowledge.

The first chip to fall was the regional network responsible for broadcasting the games of the San Diego Padres. On May 31st, MLB announced that it was putting its contingency plan into work, by taking over production and distribution of Padres broadcasts and making them available through other providers and making the games available to fans by direct subscription.

Further Reading

• Jack Baer: "Rob Manfred says MLB will handle team broadcasts if Bally Sports networks miss payments", Yahoo! Sports, February 15, 2023. [1]

Related Sites

• MLB's announcement of the take-over of San Diego Padres broadcasts