If the Texas Rangers got their way, Bally’s Sports Southwest would have missed its rights payment according to Cory Magoers.
“I’m guessing maybe the Rangers aren’t super thrilled about that,” the K&C Masterpiece co-host said Thursday on 105.3 The Fan in Dallas.
The relationship between the Rangers and the RSN’s parent company Diamond Sports Group has been complicated. Diamond only gave the franchise 75% of what it was owed in its last rights payment. According to Magoers, at some point, the Rangers must have received the rest of what they were owed, because Diamond is now “in good standing” with its debt to the team.
Co-host and former Rangers pitcher Mike Bacsik said it isn’t hard to believe Magoers’s hunch is correct. Diamond making its next payment on time means that the Rangers cannot take their television rights to the open market.
“You assume this TV money keeps going up. It’s not going down,” he said. “So if they were to get out of this long-term contract, yeah, they would lose money immediately, but they would gain so much more money over the next 5 to 10 years because the new contract they would either do on their own, where they would own their own rights and there wouldn’t be a middleman, or if they signed a new contract with another station. It would be way more money.”
Diamond has already lost the broadcast rights to the San Diego Padres. That team’s games are now streamed by Major League Baseball. The Rangers, Arizona Diamondbacks, Cincinnati Reds, and Minnesota Twins have been facing the possibility that they would be in the same boat soon.
Magoers says nothing changes for now. It doesn’t seem likely that things are smoothed over between the two sides for the long-term though. He says there is reason to believe the Rangers want to be done with Bally Sports Southwest as soon as possible.
“Remember, the Texas Rangers are the team that filed a motion back in March to terminate their contract and Diamond Sports Group’s counterargument was this isn’t worth what we’re paying and so we want it to be less.”
