The Washington Nationals became the seventh team to join Major League Baseball’s broadcasting arm on Wednesday, an expected move after years of legal disputes with their old television partner. As spring training looms next month, the baseball world now is waiting to see just how many more teams will join the Nats in-house.
In an extreme scenario, half of baseball’s 30 teams could wind up under the league’s television umbrella for 2026.
Clubs across three major sports leagues, MLB, the NBA and NHL, are mulling revised offers they received from Main Street Sports Group last week and over the weekend. Main Street, which operates various regional sports channels under the FanDuel Sports Network moniker, is a major sports broadcaster that’s trying to both find a buyer and rework its rights-fee deals to escape financial peril.
Main Street was set to carry nine MLB teams for 2026: the Atlanta Braves, Cincinnati Reds, Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, Los Angeles Angels, Miami Marlins, Milwaukee Brewers, St. Louis Cardinals and Tampa Bay Rays. But those clubs all canceled their deals last week after the company missed scheduled rights-fee payments.
“The biggest challenge” for baseball teams considering a return to Main Street is timing, said one MLB club executive granted anonymity to speak about sensitive negotiations. The company’s revised offers are predicated on Main Street finding a buyer. If it cannot, the company has told partner teams it plans to wind down its operations after the current NBA and NHL seasons.
“The offers are dependent on a sale of the company and this needs to happen in a timeframe that allows for games to be broadcast,” the baseball executive said. “With spring training games starting in around a month, that doesn’t leave a lot of remaining time to play this out.”
At least in baseball, Main Street is seeking three-year deals through 2028, sources said. In some cases, Main Street also wants the ability to delay payments this year until the second or third quarters.
Main Street is also proposing a modified rights-fee model. Regional sports stations, like those operated by Main Street, have typically paid a fixed annual fee to teams for their TV rights, usually tens of millions of dollars. Teams broadcast by MLB itself, however, do not receive such a guarantee. Instead, they make whatever the league and the team itself can bring in.
Main Street is offering something of a hybrid that still provides a standard fee but also includes a potential revenue-sharing component, sources said.
Amidst this drama, the Cardinals have decided that regardless of whether they go back to Main Street for 2026, they will handle their TV advertisements in-house, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch first reported.
Main Street has retained the financial services firm Lazard as an advisor. The last time Main Street renegotiated deals, ahead of the 2025 baseball season, some teams left the company and some teams stayed. That appears likely to repeat itself, according to people with knowledge of the talks: so long as the company remains operational, some teams probably would return to Main Street under new contract terms, while others would bolt for MLB’s group. But it depends on the financial calculus for the individual club.
Teams in some markets might be able to go to a different third party altogether. When the Texas Rangers chose not to go with Main Street for 2025, for example, they started their own network. On short notice, however, MLB is likely the simplest destination for most teams that seek a new partner.
MLB declined comment Wednesday. Last week, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters that “whether it’s Main Street, a third party or MLB media, fans are going to have the games.”
Manfred also said the goal is for clubs to maximize revenue. That desire for top dollar has already led MLB teams back to Main Street once before when the company was on shaky ground.
It was only a year ago that Main Street emerged from a bankruptcy case that lasted 20 months. The business was then known as Diamond Sports Group, and broadcast games on channels branded as Bally Sports. MLB was the most consistent critic of the company in those bankruptcy proceedings — yet several of its clubs reunited with the company anyway.
The Nats are the latest club to decide they’re financially better off letting MLB itself do work that, until only three years ago, third-party regional sports networks universally handled: the production of nightly telecasts, and the negotiations that lead to the games being available on cable and satellite providers.
The other teams currently carried by MLB are the Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Guardians, Colorado Rockies, Minnesota Twins, San Diego Padres and Seattle Mariners. MLB started to broadcast teams itself in the summer of 2023 when Diamond — the prior iteration of Main Street — dropped the Diamondbacks and Padres midseason.
The Nationals, however, wound up at MLB following a different legal drama.
The team’s prior home was not a Main Street-run station but the MidAtlantic Sports Network, or MASN. The Nats’ closest geographical rival, the Baltimore Orioles, controlled MASN, and the two teams wound up embroiled in years of legal disputes over the rights fees MASN paid to the Nats. A settlement was reached last year.
“Today’s announcement represents a new chapter for Washington Nationals baseball,” said owner Mark Lerner in a news release Wednesday. “We are excited to have already begun work with the talented team at MLB, and the collaboration is off to a strong start as we work together to elevate the viewing experience with world-class broadcasts across television and streaming.”
Teams weighing a jump to MLB face several time pressures.
For one, teams want MLB to sell as many in-market streaming packages as they can before the regular season opens in late March. The Nats package goes on sale in February for $19.99 a month or $99.99 for the year.
Streaming packages are often also called direct-to-consumer offerings, because they allow fans to watch a team’s station without having to sign up for a bundle of channels, like those that cable and satellite companies offer.
Baseball’s television rights structure and the “blackouts” it produces has long been a sore point for fans. Each club has a television territory: if a fan is watching inside that territory, that fan is considered to be “in-market.” Fans who are out-of-market have historically had an easier time accessing games, because MLB has long sold a package of out-of-market games. In-market streaming, on the other hand, didn’t arrive in full force around the league until 2025.
But time also matters for teams jumping ship because of the carriage agreements that need to be worked out. MLB and the teams want to maximize the number of deals they establish with cable and satellite companies, as well as their revenue from those deals.
That Main Street is offering deals to MLB teams through 2028 is not coincidental: that’s a key year for the sport’s media rights. The league’s national TV deals, which bring in big money, also run through 2028.
There are two important groups of TV rights in baseball: local and national. Local rights account for the 100-plus games out of the 162-game schedule that are typically aired on one local channel. Teams individually decide which channel to partner with.
National rights, meanwhile, are controlled by the league office and are what allowed ESPN to have a Sunday game of the week for so many years. NBC now has the Sunday game of the week from 2026-28.
But come 2028, when the league is negotiating its new national deals, MLB wants to be able to offer streaming companies more than the usual game-of-the-week packages. Starting in 2029, big streaming companies could become the local home for many MLB teams. MLB, therefore, wants to have as many teams’ local rights available come 2028 as possible.
That migration of local rights has actually already begun. ESPN can newly broadcast all the teams under MLB’s production umbrella — including any that soon jump over. ESPN isn’t expected to start actually airing those teams on its services until 2027, however. That sets up a two-year experiment for ESPN where the famed network will effectively also be a local broadcaster.
The NBA and NHL are most immediately affected by Main Street’s drama because they’re in the middle of their regular seasons.
The NBA has 13 teams with Main Street: the Atlanta Hawks, Charlotte Hornets, Cleveland Cavaliers, Detroit Pistons, Indiana Pacers, Los Angeles Clippers, Miami Heat, Memphis Grizzlies, Milwaukee Bucks, Minnesota Timberwolves, Oklahoma City Thunder, Orlando Magic, and San Antonio Spurs.
“The NBA is monitoring the situation and remains committed to ensuring that fans can continue to watch games locally,” the NBA said in a statement Wednesday.
The NHL has seven clubs with Main Street: The Columbus Blue Jackets, Los Angeles Kings, Detroit Red Wings, Nashville Predators, Minnesota Wild, St. Louis Blues and Carolina Hurricanes.
The NHL did not have additional comment Wednesday. Last month, the NHL said: “We are in regular communication with our clubs and are prepared to deal with any outcome in this situation. Our top priority is to ensure no disruption to our fans.”