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The St. Louis Cardinals are one of the baseball teams still in limbo as far as the future of their television broadcasts. The team has been airing on Bally Sports Midwest which was recently changed to FanDuel Sports Network Midwest, which is owned by Diamond Sports Group. The company has let the team know and said in bankruptcy proceedings, that in order to continue it would need to tear up the current contract and negotiate a new one.
According to St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports media reporter Dan Caesar, the team plans to keep its offering on cable television in the market and will also look at add a direct-to-consumer model for those that want to stream the games and those that do not have a subscription to cable. They will need to decide if that will be through working with DSG or go with an MLB-run option that six teams are using including Arizona, Colorado and San Diego for the second season.
“In any scenario, it still is going to be available on cable TV,” Cardinals senior vice president of business operations Anuk Karunaratne told the newspaper. “We need to supplement the existing (cable TV) model. The existing model is still robust. I don’t think despite what some people say that it’s going away in the near term.”
The Cardinals still do well on local television when the team is winning. However, between the cord cutting and the team having two dismal seasons, the audience is down almost 50% from two season ago. The rating for the 2022 season was 7.3. That number dropped to 5.2 during a season that saw the team go 71-91 two years ago. This year, while the total wins improved to 83, the team was mostly out of contention the last few months of the season and the attendance and interest went way down. The rating for the 2024 season was 3.9.
Usual television rating numbers for the team are in the 7’s at the low end or 9’s at the high end for a season average. Since 2000, the team peaked at a 10.0 rating in 2015. The team finished seventh in overall attendance in Major League Baseball this season, which is the lowest it has been since 2004.
According to the report, the Cardinals were set to receive $78 million next year in broadcasting rights fees, but is expected to see that drop by 20% or more.
