Welcome to baseball streaming’s year of chaos

In 2024, watching local baseball games without cable will either be cheap and simple or expensive and complicated, and it all comes down to location.

In a few lucky cities, you can spend $100 on a full-season pass and watch nearly every in-market game live–and with no blackouts. In others, you might need to spend $100 per month for local games as part of a bloated pay TV bundle. (I’ve compiled a chart of all the streaming options for each team below.)

This is the mess in which Major League Baseball finds itself as the regional sports network business collapses. Thanks to a series of miscalculations, the league and its partners have once again failed to deliver standalone baseball streaming or affordable bundled options for the majority of MLB teams. Heading into the 2024 season, only 12 out of 30 teams offer local game streams without an expensive bundle attached to it.

MLB streaming options: An overview for 2024

Here’s a chart showing every Major League Baseball team, its corresponding regional sports network (or RSN), how to get that RSN as part of a pay TV package, and whether a standalone alternative exists: (You can also view a version of this chart on Google Sheets.)

The big winners here are local fans of the Arizona Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, and San Diego Padres.

These teams were previously carried by Bally Sports, whose owner, Diamond Sports Group, filed for bankruptcy in early 2023. When Diamond failed to make interest payments to the teams, its rights reverted to the league, which in turn has launched $100-per-season streaming options for each team. (Fans can also bundle MLB.TV‘s out-of-market package for an extra $100, for a discount of $50.)

Over the past couple years, some regional sports networks have also launched their own standalone streaming options, including Marquee Sports Network, NESN, and YES Network. These are more expensive than the MLB-owned options, ranging from $20 to $30 per month, but they’re still cheaper than the full pay TV package that some other RSNs still require.

Bally Sports has its own standalone streaming service, called Bally Sports+, but it only has streaming rights for five MLB teams: The Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, Miami Marlins, Milwaukee Brewers, and Tampa Bay Rays. That leaves seven MLB teams whose Bally Sports coverage requires a pay TV bundle.

Keep in mind that these in-market streaming options still won’t get you complete coverage. Some games will be nationally televised on ESPN or Fox—plus TNT during the playoffs—while others may be exclusive to Apple TV+ (Friday night games) or Peacock.

Why is MLB streaming such a mess?

Major League Baseball is in this situation because it either failed to foresee the rise of cord-cutting or was blinded by the short-term benefits of ignoring it.

Look back, for instance, to some of the rights deals that MLB teams made in the previous decade: The Angels made a 20-year deal with Fox Sports (now Bally Sports) worth a reported $3 billion in 2011. The Rangers took $3 billion for a 20-year deal in 2010. The Cardinals committed to 15 years with Fox Sports for $1 billion in 2015, and the Reds made a similar deal the following year.

Even back then, cord-cutting was a real phenomenon, and anyone paying attention could see that it would only gather stream as more streaming options became available. Instead of planning for that outcome, the teams tied themselves to model that’s especially vulnerable to cord cutting, as people switch to live TV services without regional sports or give up cable-style bundles entirely. Prior to filing for bankruptcy, Diamond took on huge losses due to “subscriber erosion,” and Warner Bros. Discovery opted to exit the business entirely.

Mitigating the damage isn’t so easy now. While Diamond Sports Group has sought to stream more MLB teams on its Bally Sports+ service, the league wants those streaming rights for itself as it hopes to launch its own in-market streaming service next year. For a time, it seemed that Diamond would relinquish more team rights through bankruptcy, but it recently found a savior in Amazon, which is helping to pay off Diamond’s debts in exchange for an equity stake. Still, the Amazon investment doesn’t give Diamond any additional streaming rights, so the result is another stalemate that once again leaves fans in limbo.

Meanwhile, other regional sports networks have their own reasons for sticking to the bundle. SNY is partly owned by Comcast and Charter, and has “favorable and long-term deals” with those companies to be included in skinnier cable packages, the New York Post reports. In late 2022, NBCUniversal hinted at bringing regional NBC Sports networks to Peacock, but it also sold off one of those networks and hasn’t mentioned the Peacock possibility in more than a year. Instead of providing a truly standalone option, Charter is using its ownership of Spectrum SportsNet to boost home and mobile internet subscriptions, with free live Dodgers streams for customers who bundle both.

What’s a baseball fan to do?

For fans whose favorite team plays in a different city from where they live, MLB.TV remains essential, with every regular season, out-of-market game for $150 (or $130 for a single team). But as before, it’s not a solution for local games.

As Phillip Swann reports, some fans have circumvented MLB.TV’s local blackouts with a VPN, but this requires some technical expertise and additional costs, and there’s no guarantee that the league won’t block VPN use. Some viewers will inevitably turn to piracy as well, though doing so carries additional risks and moral compromises.

Otherwise, 2024 is shaping up to be another lost year for affordable baseball streaming in the majority of U.S. markets. The game itself is easier to enjoy than ever—last year’s big rule changes helped a lot—but it’s still too hard to watch when you can’t be in the stands.

Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter Weekly newsletter for more streaming TV insights.