Major League Problems With Sports Play-By-Play

Back in January of 1981, Jerry Reinsdorf, Eddie Einhorn and a bunch of investors paid 19 million dollars for the Chicago White Sox. At the time, Yankee owner, George Steinbrenner, referred to Jerry and Eddie as “The Katzenjammer Kids” because they were both 44 years-old when they took control of the Sox. While Eddie was from New Jersey, he went to law school at Northwestern and was actually a vendor at Comiskey Park during the Sox’s 1959 World Series run. He also called football and basketball games for the Wildcats on the radio. However, sports play-by-play would not be where he would make his bones. Instead, Eddie was a sports visionary on what we in broadcasting call, “The other side of the Mic”.

He started the first independent company to produce college basketball play-by-play on the radio. It wasn’t too long before Eddie took that concept to television and in 1965, TVS (Television Sports) was born. He put together a Saturday afternoon TVS game of the week that featured local teams such as Marquette, DePaul, and Notre Dame. His company bled plenty of red ink for the effort until January 20th, 1968 when he grabbed the rights to what would be called, “The Game of the Century". It featured the perennial contender and number one-ranked UCLA Bruins, with their Center Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), against the number two-ranked University of Houston Cougars and their Center, Elvin Hayes.

Oh and did I mention that the Bruins were the defending national champions and were on a 47-game winning streak? Or that the game was played in primetime at the three year-old Houston Astrodome in front of an at-the-time record crowd of 52,693? Or that Eddie paid just $27,000 for the broadcast rights on TVS? In the end, he signed up 120 stations and made a boatload of money. The Bruins were the only loser that night, going down 71–69 to the Cougars.

By 1980, he had sold his interest in TVS and took his money. But he took more than money. Eddie took his vast knowledge of Sports broadcasting to the South Side. In 1982, SportsVision was born. The idea of SportsVision was to get Chicago sports fans to sign up for a pay cable service which would provide White Sox, Bulls, Blackhawks and Sting (soccer) games. At the time of launching, SportsVision cost $50 just to get it installed (it required a special descrambler), on top of the monthly fee that varied from cable system to system. And while Eddie was indeed a visionary, it turns out that he was far-sighted. That is, he was looking too far into the future. His idea was an epic fail. The original target of 50,000 subscribers was never met. Even worse, SportsVision was the last straw in an already strained relationship between the Sox and Harry Caray. Harry didn’t like the idea of fans paying to watch baseball so he took the Redline to the Northside and as Hawk Harrelson would say, “He Gone”. Had SportsVision come just a few years, later, things would have turned out much differently.

Eddie Einhorn passed away in 2016. He lived long enough to see his “vision” of paying to watch local sports teams on TV come to fruition. Today, outside of the NFL, if you want to watch your other local “big four” pro sports team, the chances are you will have to pay a fee to a Regional Sports Network (RSN). Now stay with me here because things are about to get a bit complicated. In Chicago, we have two RSNs - NBC Sports Chicago (Sox, Blackhawks, Bulls) and Marquee Network (Cubs and Sky). NBC Sports Chicago is a consortium, owned by the three teams it airs and Comcast, owners of a lot of stuff. Marquee is owned by the Cubs and Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair owns over 190 local TV stations in the U.S. (none in Chicago) along with another company called, Diamond Sports Group. Diamond/Sinclair has ownership stakes in 21 RSNs across the country with play-by-play rights to over 40 MLB, NBA and NHL teams. They own 19 RSNs outright and are partners with the Cubs in the Marquee Network and the Yankees in the YES Network. They purchased the 19 RSNs from Disney in 2019 for 9.6 billion dollars even though they were called Fox Sports Networks at the time. That happened through a series of ownership deals. Each RSN was branded Fox Sports plus the name of the area in which they operated. For example, to our North, they were called Fox Sports Wisconsin. Once Sinclair/Diamond got their hands on those 19 networks on March 31, 2021, they were re-branded as Bally Sports (insert geography here) in a naming rights deal. But, since Diamond/Sinclair did not fully own Marquee and YES, neither of those two were branded as Bally Sports. Got all that? Good.

NBC Sports Networks and Bally/Marquee/Yes, collectively cover 27 markets. But as they say, “Wait, there’s more.” That's because there are more than 27 sports markets out there and as in Chicago, some markets have multiple RSNs. Those other networks range from huge companies who operate in multiple markets like AT&T’s, AT&T SportsNet and Spectrum’s, Spectrum SportsNet to independent companies like Stan Kroenke’s Altitude Sports in Denver. The one thing they all have in common is that they are at the epicenter of what I'm calling the “Sportsquake” of 2023. If you are a fan of local sports on TV, things are getting very shaky…like at a magnitude 9.0. We’re talking bankruptcy or worse. Things are changing so quickly that as I post this on March 6, 2023, it may be out-of-date by the time the Chicago River turns green. But here’s how things stand now:

The biggest concern is for AT&T SportsNet. They operate RSNs in the Southwest, Rocky Mountains and Pennsylvania. They're collateral damage in mergers and acquisitions between AT&T, Warner Bros and Discovery Network. Times have been tough for all RSNs since the pandemic, but very few could have foreseen the AT&T SportsNet letter of February 24th. It announed their plans to literally shut-down all AT&T SportsNet stations at the end of March. It basically gave one-month to find a new broadcast home for the MLB’s Colorado Rockies, Houston Astros and Pittsburgh Pirates, the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, Houston Rockets and Utah Jazz and the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins and Las Vegas Golden Knights. Talk about a Dear John letter.

But that’s just the tip of the sportsquake iceberg (see how I mixed disaster metaphors?). Remember Sinclair’s 9.6-billion-dollar purchase of the Fox Sports Networks? Well, that’s not exactly going very well. In fact, it looks like the Bally Sports Network gamble is going bust with bankruptcy just around the corner. They recently missed a 140 million-dollar loan interest payment. So if Chapter 11 comes calling, there goes another 19 markets and over 40 teams. And who knows how it will affect the Cubs and Yankees. While those networks are partnered with Sinclair and the teams, Marquee and YES are not exactly hitting it out of the park either. Marquee’s ratings have dropped over 50% since it launched in 2020. When Steve Goodman wrote “Go Cubs Go”, I don’t think he was talking about Cub fans going away from their TV sets.

Those lower ratings lead to lower advertising revenue. In addition, RSNs get a fee for each household that subscribes to the cable or satellite service who carry its channel. And often times that means you pay that fee. For example, if you are a subscriber to Comcast, DirecTV Satellite or Fubo streaming, take a look at your bill. In Comcast’s case, there is a section called “Service Fees”. If you’re in the Chicago area, you’ll see a line called “Regional Sports Fee” that costs $18.35 each month. Both DirecTV satellite and Fubo charge $13.99 as RSN fees. And guess what, even if you hate sports and never turn on NBC Sports Chicago or Marquee Network, you still have to pay. That’s one reason why subscribers are heading for the cord-cutting hills and less subscribers means less fees to the channel. It’s a perfect storm of lower advertising coupled with less subscriber fees. Back to Hawk Harrelson who liked to say, “This ballgame is ovuh!”

So, where do we go from here? Well, it appears we’re on the verge of a sea-change in the way we watch local sports on TV the likes of which we haven’t seen since Harry took his microphone to the Northside. Sinclair/Diamond/Bally just fired the first shot by allowing consumers to watch their local Bally Sports Channel without any other subscription. This is known as Direct to Consumer (DTC). Our northerly neighbors can now simply pay $19.99 a month directly to Bally Sports Wisconsin and watch the Brewers and Bucks as long as they have a decent internet connection. The word is that Marquee is seriously considering doing the same with the Cubs. This will anger the cable and satellite companies, but what's an RSN to do?

I’ll tell you what they can do – sign-off completely. In AT&T SportsNet’s case, they are taking their collective bats, balls and pucks and going home. This is such a fluid situation that no one really knows what will happen but this year, March Madness has a whole new meaning. While NCAA basketball is unaffected, some pro teams are about to hit the panic button. The end of March means the beginning of the MLB season as well as upcoming playoffs for both the NBA and NHL. And while we appear to be in good shape here in Chicago (aside from how our teams play), that may not be the case in places like Houston, Denver and Pittsburgh. Astros, Rockies, Pirates and other AT&T SportsNet teams' fans are going to be awfully angry if their games are not on TV. So, how do we keep our game viewing safe at home?

When the dust finally settles, one scenario is that the winner may very well be the leagues themselves. Each of them already allows you to watch out-of-town games via their own streaming services such as “MLB At Bat” and “NBA League Pass”. It’s not like there’s an invisible fence that won’t allow those services to stream local games. Up until now, local team blackouts were a business favor to the RSN’s. Each team claimed a territory and that protected its RSN. This allows for some really weird territories. For example in Springfield Illinois, if you subscribe to “MLB At Bat,” you can’t watch Cubs, White Sox or Cardinal games on it. It’s even worse in Iowa where those three teams plus the Brewers, Royals and Twins are all blacked-out on the App. Not exactly a field of dreams for fans of those teams.

So what’s a league commissioner to do? As I mentioned above, the NFL’s Roger Goodell can just sit back and count his money because he really doesn’t have a horse in this race. But the MLB’s Rob Manfred, the NBA’s Adam Silver and the NHL’s Gary Bettman certainly do. They better get to riding their horses rather quickly, assuming AT&T SportsNet is not playing their own game of “chicken”.

There are several options from individual teams going directly to the consumer to the leagues themselves taking over local broadcasts. It’s even possible that good old over-the-air TV stations may gain some broadcasts. But there is one more issue to be considered – those pesky players. Remember them? They are gonna stick their collective gloves out and ask for a little something for the effort. So don’t expect our fees to go down. In fact, they'll probably go up. It’s always us fans who get stuck with the bill. Whatever happens, there better be an answer soon because while we in Chicago may be fine this season, just wait til next year.

On the album, Chicago VII, Robert Lamm wrote the song, “Harry Truman”. The first words he sings are, “America needs you, Harry Truman.” He needs to change those lyrics, to, “America needs you, Eddie Einhorn.”