Bally Sports KC’s parent company plans to stop airing Royals games, per report

The future of televised Royals games was thrown into question Wednesday when the parent company of Bally Sports Kansas City said it planned to drop almost all of its MLB contracts.

Diamond Sports Group, which owns Bally Sports Kansas City, filed for bankruptcy in March 2023, and has been trying to restructure its finances ever since.

Sportico’s Anthony Crupi reported Tuesday on X that Diamond Sports’ counsel told the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas that it plans to void all of its remaining MLB contracts except one: the Atlanta Braves.

“The debtors are assuming a single telecast agreement, that of the Atlanta Braves,” Diamond Sports Group counsel Andrew Goldman to the court, per the Sportico story. “All of Major League Baseball’s other agreements will be rejected under the plan.”

The Royals’ contract with Bally Sports Kansas City was set to expire following the 2025 season, but Diamond apparently is ready to end the deal as soon as possible.

That decision caught Major League Baseball off guard.

“We have no information about what is being done,” Jim Bromley, a lawyer for MLB, said in the court hearing, per The Athletic’s Evan Drellich. “We’ve had no opportunity to review and now we’re in front of the court and being asked to make our comments.”

Diamond left the door ajar, saying while it plans to reject its current agreement with the Royals, it would be open to a renegotiated deal with KC, Sportico said.

“Today marks an important step forward for Diamond with the filing of a baseline plan to enable us to emerge from bankruptcy as a viable, go-forward business before year-end,” a Diamond Sports Group spokesman said in a statement provided to The Star. “We have delivered proposals to and remain in discussions with our MLB team partners around go-forward plans. We firmly believe that through our linear and digital offerings we have created the best economic and fan-friendly engine for all of our team partners.”

What it means for Royals

Royals CEO and chairman John Sherman likely will be happy with Diamond’s plan, probably wouldn’t be amenable to a renegotiated contract.

Shortly before spring training, Sherman expressed his desire to see a change in the Royals’ broadcast rights.

“I think long term, the league ultimately would like to get those rights back,” Sherman said. “I mean, that’s really what they’ve been arguing in the bankruptcy court. ...

“Ultimately we’d like to get the rights back and then put together our own partnership with — maybe it’s Amazon, maybe it’s Apple. We think baseball has left some money on the table in terms of our media rights values.”

It’s far too early to know if future Royals games will be streamed on one of the bigger national platforms, but cord-cutting fans have expressed their displeasure about not having better options for watching the team.

Since the start of the 2023 season, Major League Baseball has taken over production of broadcasts for the Padres, Diamondbacks and Rockies. That came after those teams saw their television deals with Bally Sports and AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain fall apart.

In the case of the Padres, their games went from being available via cable TV or streaming in 1.13 million homes to approximately 3.26 million, MLB said. Royals fans who couldn’t stream games would welcome such an increase.

The MLB-produced broadcasts included the announcers who had been used previously, so Ryan Lefebvre, Rex Hudler, Joel Goldberg and Jeff Montgomery would still be calling Royals games.

A Minnesota Star Tribune story said the Padres, Rockies and Diamondbacks games were available in local markets on MLB’s website at a cost of $99.99 a year (or $19.99 monthly).

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said the league sought to make its games more accessible.

“We’ll go direct to distributor on the cable side, and we will light up MLB.TV in-market to give you a digital alternative,” Manfred said, per the Star Tribune. “We think that will increase our reach in terms of giving people who have cut the cord the opportunity to watch local games.”