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Alden Gonzalez
In response to more financial instability from their regional sports network operator, and in hopes of providing themselves with some much-needed flexibility, nine Major League Baseball teams have terminated their contracts with Main Street Sports Group, sources told ESPN on Thursday.
Main Street, which holds 29 NBA, NHL and MLB teams in its portfolio and broadcasts their games under the name FanDuel Sports, emerged from a lengthy bankruptcy proceeding at the start of 2025 but finds itself in deep financial trouble again. Recent reports from Sports Business Journal stated that the company will dissolve at the end of the current NBA and NHL seasons if it does not execute a sale to another platform.
That state of flux prompted all nine MLB teams under the portfolio — the Atlanta Braves, Cincinnati Reds, Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, Los Angeles Angels, Miami Marlins, Milwaukee Brewers, St. Louis Cardinals and Tampa Bay Rays — to terminate their original deals with Main Street.
All those teams could return to the RSN operator if it finds another buyer and improves its outlook for the 2026 season, sources said; opting out now, though, gives those teams the flexibility to explore other alternatives in the meantime, including the possibility of joining MLB. It also protects them in case the company goes through another bankruptcy, though a source with Main Street recently depicted that as unlikely.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Main Street wrote: “We remain in active dialogue with all of our MLB team partners regarding potential revised terms of our agreements going forward.”
MLB currently holds the rights to the Arizona Diamondbacks, San Diego Padres, Cleveland Guardians, Colorado Rockies, Minnesota Twins and Seattle Mariners, with the Washington Nationals also expected to be part of the mix this season. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said Thursday that the league has the capability to take on distribution of any number of additional teams that choose to come on board.
“No matter what happens, whether it’s Main Street, a third party or MLB media, fans are going to have the games,” Manfred told The Associated Press at a news conference pledging 250,000 volunteer hours to support charitable organizations leading up to the United States’ 250-year anniversary.
Under a local-media department installed in response to RSN turmoil two years ago, MLB broadcasts games, negotiates cable and satellite distribution agreements, generates advertising revenue and makes local streaming available through MLB.tv — owned by ESPN under a new media-rights agreement — for teams that fall off their local-media contracts.
That arrangement, though, does not come close to matching the value generated from traditional cable deals, which account for 20% to 30% of team revenues and are especially valuable because they’re a source of fixed, reliable income. The potential loss of that revenue for nine additional teams could have a major impact on spending this offseason, further exacerbating payroll-disparity concerns as the linear-cable model continues to crumble.
In 2024, MLB and the MLB Players Association agreed to use some of the money generated from luxury tax overages to help fund teams that took local-media losses up to $15 million. That, however, was only a one-time thing.
Main Street was once Diamond Sports Group, a subsidiary of Sinclair that took on nearly $9 billion of debt to purchase 21 regional channels from Fox, pushing it into bankruptcy in March 2023. Twenty-two months later — after several missed payments, continual angst, bitter court battles and a three-month period in which Comcast pulled its channels off the air — the company emerged from bankruptcy.
By Jan. 2, 2025, the company had secured a new naming-rights deal, retained a robust portfolio across three leagues and signed a commercial agreement with Amazon. There was hope for sustained operations — and those did not last even a whole year. Sports Business Journal reported in late December that Main Street Sports had missed a payment to the Cardinals and that it was pitching a last-ditch sale to the streaming and entertainment platform DAZN in order to save its business.
More missed payments have followed, sources said. And SBJ reported late Wednesday night that Main Street’s talks with DAZN are “all but extinguished” after the company demanded that teams take massive pay cuts in new rights contracts.
The nine MLB teams that remained with Main Street Sports coming off the bankruptcy period signed new deals. None of those deals, though, extends beyond 2028, according to a source, which falls in line with MLB’s hopes of putting all 30 teams under a national umbrella by then.