MLB

Amazon’s Fire TV has added thousands of hours of free ad-supported video and live content to its platform in the U.S., including sports highlights from MLB, NBC Sports and Fox sports. New free content is accessible from dedicated rows on the Fire TV Home and Free screens and spans three categories of sports news and highlights, trending trailers, and food and cooking. Amazon is touting live, on-demand, and short-form content. Users can access without any sign-ups, downloads or fees to get the instant video playback.

MLB, the NBA and the NHL may orchestrate a buyout of the nation’s dominant owner of regional sports TV networks, whose shaky finances pose an increasing threat to their teams. The trio of pro-sports leagues are expected to soon begin talks with Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Diamond Sports, which operates 21 regional Bally Sports networks that account for more than half the local broadcast markets around the country, sources close to the situation say.

Several weeks into the baseball season, the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network remains an outlier, keeping its announcers for the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals at home for road games. Instead of traveling, the broadcasters are calling the games from the broadcasts booths inside their local stadiums, a tricky task for play-by-play announcers Bob Carpenter with the Nationals and Kevin Brown with the Orioles. The effect on the broadcast has been noticed by fans, with delayed commentary a frequent frustration, such as when a key Oakland error was called several seconds after Orioles fans saw it on MASN

Mark Lerner, Ted Lerner’s son who now serves as the club’s managing principal owner, said Monday that the family has hired New York investment bank Allen & Co. to research potential investors, and possibly buyers, for the MLB franchise.

The Chicago Cubs are looking at direct-to-consumer streaming service that would make  games available to fan who don’t subscribe to cable or satellite TV, a team official said. The team wants get the service ready for the 2023 season, but Carne Kenney, president of business operations for the Cubs, said that Major League Baseball, distributors, pricing and technology issues all must be overcome.

Deals with Apple TV Plus and Peacock could help revive the national pastime.

NBCUniversal’s Peacock is nearing a deal with Major League Baseball for exclusive rights to stream games in a new Sunday time slot, according to people familiar with the discussions, as the league looks to increase digital partnerships. The deal with NBCU would involve a package of 18 games, some beginning at 11:30 a.m. ET and others just after noon, the people said. That would limit the conflict with Sunday games that typically start at 1 p.m., making the telecasts more valuable for Peacock. The games would primarily be played on the East Coast, given the early timing, the people said.

The new streaming deal between Major League Baseball and Apple is worth $85 million annually over seven years, according to several sources familiar with the agreement who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the terms.

The bargaining standoff between Major League Baseball and its players that led to last week’s cancellation of Opening Day is a particularly bitter pill to swallow for the local and national outlets that bring games to their most ardent fans — networks that already have experienced two seasons of COVID-driven disruptions.

The 2022 Major League Baseball season will not start on time, according to Commissioner Rob Manfred. “I had hoped against hope that I would not have to have this particular press conference in which I am going to cancel some regular season games,” Manfred said Tuesday afternoon. On the 90th day of an owner-implemented lockout and the ninth straight day of in-person bargaining, the league and union were unable to reach a mutually tolerable collective bargaining agreement.

MLB and NBC Sports have had serious talks about the network broadcasting games this season. If a deal comes to fruition, most of the games are expected to be on NBC’s streaming platform, Peacock.

As negotiations on a new labor agreement continue to drag, Major League Baseball is pulling out the big gun threats. On Wedneday, a management spokesperson said MLB will begin canceling regular-season games if the league and the Players Association can’t come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement by Monday.

Sinclair Broadcast Group said it plans to launch its direct-to-consumer product in the five markets where it has rights to stream baseball teams in the first half of 2022. Sinclair said that following rights renewals with the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, its Bally Sports regional sports networks have rights to launch DTC products with a total of 33 teams.

Now that Amazon has established itself in live sports, most recently through a $1 billion deal to air “Thursday Night Football,” Apple is trying to jump into the game. Apple is in talks with Major League Baseball to acquire the rights to its weekday package, according to people with knowledge of the deal who asked not to be named because discussions are confidential. An agreement would, for the first time, align the most valuable U.S. tech company with a pro sports media package and give Apple a major content boost for its streaming service, Apple TV+.

ESPN on Friday outlined a new strategy for its flagship Sunday Night Baseball, setting up Rodriguez and veteran sports commentator Michael Kay in a special flanker presentation of eight games on ESPN2 while enlisting David Cone in a new multi-year deal alongside Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez for the original SNB. The plan appears to emulate what ESPN has done in the fall, broadcasting its regular Monday Night Football on its primary cable network while setting up the Manning brothers and guests ranging from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to David Letterman in a freewheeling bull session that plays off game action.

The strategy, management’s equivalent of a strike under federal labor law, ended the sport’s labor peace after 9,740 days over 26 1/2 years. Teams decided to force the long-anticipated confrontation during an offseason rather than risk players walking out during the summer, as they did in 1994. Players and owners had successfully reached four consecutive agreements without a work stoppage, but they have been accelerating toward a clash for more than two years.

The first five Series games averaged 3 hours, 41 minutes, up from 3:37 for the Los Angeles Dodgers’ six-game win over Tampa Bay last year. The opener took 4:06 and Game 5 lasted exactly 4 hours, both ending after midnight on the East Coast. This year’s overall postseason average of 3:38 is an increase from 3:32 last year.

After teams in the NFL and Major League Baseball have dropped names considered and offensive to Native Americans the last two years, the Braves chop on — with the support of baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred.

Major League Baseball is in talks to launch a nationwide video-streaming service that would enable fans to watch their teams’ hometown games without a cable-TV subscription. The web-based service — which could address a decades-old annoyance for baseball fans that some have partly blamed for the league’s steadily declining viewership — could launch as early as the 2023 season, a person with direct knowledge of the negotiations said.

Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred is not a fan of Sinclair Broadcast Group’s $250 million plan to parlay its 19 regional sports networks into a streaming service. For one thing, Manfred doesn’t believe Sinclair has enough digital rights from the 14 MLB clubs it has licensing agreements with to pull off such an enterprise.

After a 2020 “bubble” of neutral sites, the MLB returns to a more traditional postseason format this fall. Big onsite crews are back, vaxxed and masked, and they’re deploying new cameras and presentation graphics to give the games their sharpest look yet. Above, Fox’s Megalodon camera unit features a handheld mirrorless Sony camera with a shallow depth-of-field lens and a stabilizing gimbal rig that provides a very different up-close look of players.

The use of jam band music by Fox Sports during some Major League Baseball games has fans — and some band members —  lighting up social media. “It kind of became a thing,” says Joe Carpenter, the lead audio mixer for Fox Sports.

TBS is looking to turn to a Hall of Fame broadcasting pinch-hitter to host the National League Championship Series between Oct. 15 and 24. Bob Costas and TBS are working toward an agreement that would see him host the network’s marquee MLB event. TBS wanted to alleviate the pressure on TBS’s regular host, Ernie Johnson, as his duties on Inside the NBA begin in mid-October. Johnson is expected to host the opening rounds of the TBS playoff coverage.

There’s a new purpose-built Major League Baseball field in Dyersville, Iowa, set to host the first MLB game ever in the state, on the farm where the 1989 movie Field of Dreams was shot. The game is on Thursday, Aug. 12, between the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox with pre-game hoopla starting at 6 p.m. ET on Fox.

The Cleveland Indians new name is. . .The Guardians. The Indians announced the new name on Twitter on Friday morning. They have been called the Indians since 1915. The franchise announced the name change in a video narrated by Cleveland fan Tom Hanks with music supplied by The Black Keys from the Akron area. There will be a press conference on Friday afternoon at Progressive Field to officially announce the name change.

Denver’s FBI office said late on Sunday it does not believe the four people arrested with massive weaponry and body armor were planning an attack on Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, set for Tuesday near the site of the arrests. The FBI Denver tweeted that it is not aware of any threat to the All-Star Game events, venues, players or the community at this time. However, it did not explain why the four arrestees had the weapons cache and body armor in the downtown Denver area.

The league said it would remove its midsummer showcase and its annual entry draft as a response to the state’s new voting law.

OTT streamers seem to be waiting until the last minute, or maybe not at all, to hammer out deals.

The series of 21 telecasts start on Wednesday, April 7, at 1:10 p.m. ET when the Boston Red Sox host the AL champion Tampa Bay Rays in the finale of a two-game series, MLB and YouTube said Monday. The games are exclusive and will not be televised by club broadcast partners.

With coronavirus infections dipping nationwide, one might think Major League Baseball’s owners would feel a bit more optimistic about spring training starting in a few weeks. Instead, they want to delay or even shorten the upcoming season, hoping that widespread vaccine distribution would create safer conditions for players and allow fans to buy tickets to attend again. The Players Association, however, argues that MLB has no legal grounds to deviate from the 2021 schedule that has been set since July without its consent and expects to push ahead with a full slate.

ESPN and Major League Baseball are closing in on a TV deal that would provide the network exclusive rights to the first round of the playoffs. Now all that is needed is a first round of the playoffs. That needs to be negotiated between MLB and the Players Association, which is to say that, while an ESPN-MLB deal is close, they are still far from knowing when — and even if — there will be playoffs expanded from 10 to likely 14 teams to include a best-of-three first round.

The 76-year-old Michaels was voted the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcast excellence by Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame on Wednesday and will be honored July 24 during the Hall’s induction weekend.

The six games on Fox averaged a 5.2 rating/12 share and 9,785,000 viewers, Nielsen said Wednesday. The previous low was a 7.6 rating/12 share and 12,660,000 viewers for the San Francisco Giants’ four-game sweep of the Detroit Tigers in 2012.