SBJ Media: MLB teams keep weathering RSN storm

RIP to both my NCAA Tourney brackets, but I don’t know how people are doing their jobs when there’s basketball on 24/7. Gotta love March.

I headed out to Harrison, N.J., last night for Gotham FC’s home opener against the Orlando Pride at the Red Bulls’ newly rebranded Sports Illustrated Stadium (it was the NWSL team’s best attendance yet for a home opener). When I told my friend -- who was standing next to me looking at her phone -- that Orlando scored within the first minute, she told me that wasn’t funny. Then she looked up at the field and realized I wasn’t kidding.

Time and time again, we hear “MLB is tribal.” Or “baseball is local.” Well, it’s true.

Almost 80% of all MLB consumption happens through RSNs or other local/regional outlets. And as one senior RSN exec tells me, around 25% of a baseball team’s total revenue comes from media.

Among the sports dealing with RSN chaos, baseball teams sustain the highest losses when deals fall apart. That math has seen teams like the Reds and Brewers return to Main Street Sports Group (owners of the FanDuel Sports-branded RSNs) instead of choosing a deal with MLB Media for distribution of games this season.

The RSN source told me no team wants to publicly acknowledge it, but ditching an RSN for other types deals to “increase the reach” doesn’t come closer to solving the loss of media revenue.

“Everybody’s trying to find the balance of reach and economics,” the source told me. “It’s more challenging in baseball.”

Figuring out direct-to-consumer delivery is also key for MLB teams (27 of 30 teams have now solved the DTC issue). “Individually, the numbers might be smaller scale, but collectively, when you look across the entire ... RSN perspective, there’s going to be a nice bump, just because teams finally have it,” said Lindsay Amstutz, president of media and partnerships at Playfly Sports.

Pro sports RSN comps

The challenge for MLB teams, vis-à-vis local media dollars, has a lot to do with more lucrative national rights. ESPN has opted out of a deal after this season, and MLB has smaller pacts with the likes of Apple and Roku to complement nationals deals with Fox and TNT Sports that run through 2028. For NBA teams facing RSN headaches, they can better weather a storm with money set to come in from national media deals (to the tune of $77 billion coming from new pacts with ESPN, NBC and Amazon starting in the fall).

The NHL, which is the third head of the RSN Cerberus in the U.S., sustains the least losses when RSN deals don’t pan out, according to Playfly Sports CEO Craig Sloan. “Their entire business model doesn’t generate the same revenues as NBA and MLB,” he said. “The percentage, of those three sports -- it’s the lowest for local media rights compared to ticketing and other things that drive a lot more [revenue].”

The RSN model isn’t broken -- at least for ad sales

RSNs aren’t seeing advertising dollars fly away like many are seeing with subscribers and audience numbers.

“Just to give some relative scale, these RSNs and local broadcasters across Major League Baseball this year will do more baseball advertising revenue than Fox, ESPN, Turner, MLB Network and Apple combined,” said Sloan. “A tremendous amount of national network advertisers are using this vehicle as a reach and engagement vehicle.”

So as MLB gets set for its traditional Opening Day on Thursday with 28 squads taking the field, the waters remain choppy for team media distribution. But ad dollars are there for clubs, and DTC plans -- long a thorny issue for baseball -- are in place for all but a handful of teams.

ESPN and MLB may have announced a divorce after this season, but longtime baseball voice Karl Ravech remains optimistic about the future of the sport on his network.

“I don’t think ESPN being in what may be its final year of ‘Sunday Night Baseball’ becomes any part of our story,” Ravech told me on a media call earlier today. “Our story is to tell the story of the players and teams. There are very smart people that are trying to figure out ways to move forward with Major League Baseball. That’s way above my pay grade to negotiate that, but I’m very optimistic about ESPN and Major League Baseball’s future.”

Ravech, who has been at ESPN for 32 of the 36 years that the company has been an MLB national media rights partner, knows sports is a “ratings-driven business.” But he also believes in what ESPN has been able to deliver for the sport.

“Who else provides any more coverage of baseball -- with the exception of MLB Network -- than ESPN does?” he asked. “I’m just optimistic because of the platform that ESPN is and will be with ‘Flagship.’ When you think about the entities that are [going to be] on that ‘Flagship’ ... I don’t want to say it requires, but my goodness -- if you’re a sports fan, you’re going to want to have [baseball].”

But for this season, Ravech believes it’s standard operating procedure for him and the ESPN MLB crew. “Our goal is to continue to do what we do better than anybody, which is to present the game in an entertaining, enjoyable way,” he said.

Thanks for the memories

The entire ESPN MLB crew had some favorite memories they shared. For Ravech, he specifically talked about interviews with the players, singling out the Phillies’ Brandon Marsh last season when mic’d up and asked for a hypothetical band name of Phillies players (the fictional band name “Stay Loose and Sexy,” ended up being T-shirts for the clubhouse).

Buster Olney similarly went for a player interview. “Bryce Harper, a Hall of Famer in terms of wearing the microphone for us,” Olney said. “His earpiece when he slammed into the wall came out, and he helped us out in between innings, going out and looking in the dirt and finding the technology and putting it in. He was on with us for like eight innings, and it was in a disastrous game. I think the Braves scored like 10 runs in the first inning.”

Olney also had memories of the Cubs’ Jake Arrieta throwing a no-hitter in his first night on “SNB,” and the night Osama Bin Laden was killed and announced during the bottom of the eighth during a Mets-Phillies matchup.

For analyst Eduardo Pérez, beyond player stories, he was appreciative for the opportunity that baseball on ESPN has presented. “Being a kid and watching ‘Sunday Night Baseball’ and seeing my hero, Joe Morgan, being able to be in that seat. Fast forward, I’m sitting there along with my best friends, and being able to talk about the game to me -- that’s what it’s all about. Baseball brings that. ESPN has brought that throughout the years and we’ve been able to go into everyone’s home and be able to continue to provide great moments, and I’m hopeful that this year will be the same.”

Trailblazing Sports Group landed its first major deal, a seven-figure pact with QuickBooks that runs through April and includes partnerships with The Gist, Re-Inc, OneTeam Partners, Impakt Partners Productions and Sports Innovation Lab audiences.

Trailblazing Sports founder Sara Gotfredson said that her firm’s deal with QuickBooks is unique in that it’s the most comprehensive sponsorship the accounting software brand has done in women’s sports.

“We know that female athletes, when they retire, they don’t have all the money in the world just to sit back like male athletes do and invest,” Gotfredson said. “The concept was how can QuickBooks really fuel the growth within all aspects of the ecosystem?”

A major part of the campaign is a five-part digital series “Power Moves,” which features entrepreneurs in women’s sports. Two episodes are already live, with one having an appearance by longtime women’s soccer stars Tobin Heath and Christen Press (now with Re-Inc) alongside Jax Diener, owner of the Watch Me! Sports Bar in NYC. Impakt Partners is producing and shooting the episodes. Gold Medal-winning U.S. sprinter Allyson Felix is among those featured in upcoming episodes.

“It’s all about telling the authentic brand story, because women’s sports fans can see through the bullshit,” said Gotfredson.

On the small business side, there’s official Player’s Associations partnerships with the USWNTPA and WNPBA, which includes a content series and produced content running across media partners.

“Women are underfunded when they try and launch their companies,” said Gotfredson. “QuickBooks is putting their money where their mouth is and they’re actually solving a problem in women’s sports.”

A sponsorship marketing firm, Trailblazing Sports has also landed deals with Amazon Business, along with a new business-of-women’s-sports podcast package, which includes Caroline Fitzgerald’s Goals, Re-Inc, Just Women’s Sports, The Gist and The Athletic.

“Our vision of elevating smaller partners in the women’s sports space is manifested with this partnership,” said Gotfredson.

• Scott Van Pelt will move on-site to Palm Beach Gardens for TGL’s best-of-three season finale that tees off at 9pm ET on ESPN2, notes SBJ’s Josh Carpenter. Van Pelt has served as ESPN’s TGL host throughout the season, but has done so from his D.C. studio.
• Fox will air a UFL game every Friday of the regular season at 8pm ET -- the first time the second-year league, or its predecessor leagues, has had a window that remained constant through an entire season, writes SBJ’s Ben Fischer.
• The CW’s broadcast booth on Saturday covered a NASCAR Xfinity Series race remotely for the first time, and did so for the Homestead-Miami race at NASCAR’s new production facility in a just-unveiled, extended reality stage, reports SBJ’s Adam Stern.
• SailGP is in the final year of its broadcast deal with CBS in the U.S., and while the league has begun generating media rights fees in some foreign markets such as France and New Zealand, domestic broadcast is not yet a revenue driver, reports SBJ’s Chris Smith.
• Snack Sports is taking on March Madness with a TikTok-like approach to highlights, writes SBJ’s Ben Portnoy.
• The Mets have not been affected by the RSN shuffling across baseball, and can count on about $100 million in annual rights fees from SNY (which is not owned by Steve Cohen), notes SBJ’s Mike Mazzeo.
• SBJ contributor Shira Springer writes under the header, “Athlete-driven content sheds light on rising value of women’s sports.”