Bill Bennett is no run-of-the-mill baseball fan. The Richardson resident had Texas Rangers season tickets for years, he’s a member of the Dallas–Fort Worth chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research, and he even attended Adrian Beltré’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony last July, in Cooperstown, New York.
The 1971 TCU grad holds a PhD in biochemistry, so he’s also a problem solver. Yet when he switched cable providers a few years ago, he just about gave up trying to watch local broadcasts of Rangers games, because the switch left him without Bally Sports Southwest, the regional sports network (RSN) that holds the team’s TV rights. “It kind of snuck up on me,” Bennett said. “All of a sudden, the games weren’t there. And once you get frustrated with it, you kind of walk away.”
Bennett is among the many Rangers fans following news about the MLB franchise’s tenuous relationship with the broadcaster. For the second consecutive September, the club’s contract with Bally will expire at season’s end. Bally’s parent organization, Diamond Sports Group, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2023. The claim is scheduled to be resolved in mid-November.
Last offseason, the Rangers negotiated out of a contract with Bally that ran through 2034, but the franchise agreed to remain through 2024. Not so for the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and NHL’s Dallas Stars, which bolted from Bally this summer. (Bally Sports Southwest also broadcasts San Antonio Spurs and Dallas Wings games.)
The Rangers won’t comment publicly on their broadcast future. Will they re-up with Bally, pending the outcome of Diamond’s bankruptcy proceedings, or will the organization take a different route? And wherever Rangers games are broadcast next season, how much trouble will fans like Bennett have to go through to watch the team play?
North Texas hockey and basketball fans have their respective answers. The Stars announced in July that they’ll stream broadcasts through an app called Victory+, which launched earlier this month. The Mavericks, meanwhile, announced that their local broadcasts will be produced by Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA and aired on another channel. It might take some effort for viewers to find games, but in neither case will fans have to pay subscription fees to watch their teams play in the 2024–25 season.
Cord-cutting is to blame for Diamond Sports’ financial plight. Anthony Crupi, who writes for the sports business website Sportico, said cable subscriptions overall have dropped by about 40 percent over the past decade. “And the endemic circumstances that have basically destroyed the RSN model are not going to get any better,” Crupi said. As cable viewership fell over the years, operations like Diamond sought reductions in the broadcast-rights fees they had negotiated with teams years earlier, when RSNs, in Crupi’s words, “were ATMs—[they] spit out money.”
Brad Alberts, the Stars president and CEO, told Texas Monthly the team accepted a significantly reduced payment from Diamond only weeks before the 2023–24 season began—the second consecutive year of reductions, he said—to make sure the games could be seen on TV. Alberts said Bally Sports Southwest “was one of, if not the, worst financial regions for Diamond and Bally’s company in the country.”
The Stars began exploring broadcast alternatives soon after Diamond filed for bankruptcy. One option was to go over the air, as the Mavericks are doing, and Alberts said the organization’s talks in that area included “substantial discussions” with Tegna, the Mavs’ broadcast partner. “But it just didn’t end up to be something that I thought was in our best interest,” he said.
In July, the Stars announced they would become the first major men’s pro sports franchise to stream games for free rather than charge fans a monthly fee. With no rights fee from a broadcast source and no revenue from customers, the Stars plan to sell ads for telecasts of live games and additional programming on the app.
Crupi is skeptical. “If they can be the first one to make it work, that’s cool,” he said. “I don’t think we’re at a place where you can forgo television. I’m really surprised about that.”
The Stars streamed their first preseason game, a 2–1 win over the St. Louis Blues, on Victory+ Saturday night. “We went into this knowing if we take care of the fans, the advertisers will come,” Alberts said at the launch. “We’re pioneering a new path. I’ll ask for patience from everyone as well as we work through the kinks with this. We obviously believe that this is the future.”
To Texas Monthly, Alberts added: “I would say so far, considering we’re only about two months into this, the advertising reaction has been unbelievable. We’ve only had one advertiser from last year so far not buy yet, and they just are kind of waiting to see. I think a number of them here in Dallas think, obviously like we do, that this is a future and are happy and excited to see us pioneer it.”
In late August, Diamond Sports Group renewed broadcast deals with thirteen of the fifteen NBA teams its regional networks carried last season. The other two franchises—the Mavericks and the New Orleans Pelicans—were with Bally Sports Southwest and its sister network in New Orleans. Dallas’s separation came as little surprise, given that Mark Cuban, the team’s longtime majority owner and now minority stakeholder, told The Dallas Morning News last November that the Mavs were “very likely done with Bally’s” after the 2023–24 season.
On September 6, the Mavericks announced they’d make their regional broadcasts available over the air. In addition to on WFAA, Tegna will make games available via its stations in Abilene, Midland-Odessa, San Angelo, Tyler, and Waco, along with a second Dallas station, KMPX. WFAA will head production of the broadcasts, while most of the games will be seen in Dallas on KMPX.
The coupling of the Mavericks and WFAA began last January, when, following an agreement between the NBA and Diamond, the Mavs were allowed to shift thirteen of their remaining Bally games for the season to the Dallas station. The team now touts the availability of the new broadcast arrangement, stating that the move will nearly triple the potential audience for Mavs games. In public statements, the team hasn’t revealed financial details, such as how much Tegna is paying the franchise for broadcast rights. The Mavericks also declined to discuss that with Texas Monthly. Said Sportico’s Crupi: “If the Mavs had stayed with the RSN, they would have taken about a thirty-five percent cut. I’ve been told [the deal with Tegna] is even less. But I’m not too worried about them because [the NBA] just signed an insanely gigantic new national TV deal.”
It’s worth noting, though, that Cuban, when asked why he sold his majority share in the franchise last November, cited the loss of income from regional broadcast deals and said that the new owners, casino billionaire Miriam Adelson and her family, could better replace that revenue from other sources.
So what will the Rangers do?
The length of MLB’s 162-game season makes the baseball franchise’s broadcast situation different from those of the Mavericks and the Stars. The Mavericks will have 30 of their 82 regular-season contests televised nationally on ABC, ESPN, TNT, and NBA TV. Fourteen of the Stars’ 82 games will go national. Meanwhile, 153 of the Rangers’ 162 regular-season games this year were only available via Bally Sports Southwest.
Crupi said the Rangers contract that Diamond took over from Fox Sports before the 2021 season paid the club $95 million this year, which was a reduced rate. The Rangers, like the Mavericks and the Stars, declined to provide financial details to Texas Monthly beyond confirming that the franchise received all its scheduled payments from Diamond.
Will the organization’s priority be to reach as many viewers as possible, regardless of finances? Or will it seek as large a rights fee as possible and hope to also increase its audience over a five-state region (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico) and satisfy more fans like Bill Bennett?
“The great push and pull here is reach versus up-front money,” said Evan Drellich, a senior baseball writer for The Athletic who concentrates on the business of the sport. Crupi said it’s possible the Rangers could do another short-term cable deal if Diamond emerges from bankruptcy in two months—the team is one of twelve MLB franchises on a Bally RSN this season—but that would again delay knowing the organization’s operating budget until well into the offseason.
Crupi said a Rangers reconciliation with Bally Sports Southwest for any amount of time would also conflict with his perception of tensions between Diamond Sports and Major League Baseball. “There’s a deep, abiding dislike between the sides,” said Crupi.
Given the number of games to be broadcast and the player payroll compared to that of an NBA or NHL team, it’s unlikely the Rangers would go solely over the air. “It’ll probably be a hybrid,” Crupi said. “Over the air has to be your foundation, and then streaming, because that’s the future.”
Bill Bennett is waiting.
“My preference would be what the Mavericks are doing,” he said. “Although, I guess if it was a streaming thing, I could do that.”
