How cable-TV chaos in the U.S. could benefit Blue Jays' rebuild

Here's an unexpected question for the Toronto Blue Jays in an offseason full of them: How much will they be affected by the 2023 bankruptcy of an American sports network?

You wouldn't think much, but there are butterfly effect possibilities. Diamond Sports Group (DSG), which through its previously named Bally Sports brand carried the local broadcast rights for dozens of U.S. baseball, basketball, and hockey teams, has been mired in a long bankruptcy proceeding. Many of those MLB teams have been searching for local broadcast alternatives since last month after Diamond renounced the rights to all but the Atlanta Braves during the restructuring process.

Last month, MLB announced that three teams - Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Minnesota - would have their games produced and distributed by MLB in 2025, joining San Diego, Colorado, and Arizona, which the league worked with in 2024. (Texas is still pursuing a local deal before turning to the MLB option. St. Louis announced Thursday it had re-signed with DSG.)

The significance for the Blue Jays, and indeed the rest of the league, is that teams with the new broadcast arrangements are going to take a serious financial hit, at least in the short term. Regional sports networks were a boon to teams because many households paid for them as part of their cable or satellite packages even if they never watched a baseball game. (This is also what made the business precarious in a cord-cutting world.)

And while the dollar figures will be different for each team, and could be partially offset by replacement revenue through MLB-produced broadcasts, reports suggest initial losses of annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars.

That's a significant amount, especially when none of the six teams going MLB-only are in large markets and all but the Padres have traditionally been cautious spenders.

How many of those clubs will look at their planned 2025 payroll, consider the impact of losing a chunk of local broadcast revenue, and decide they have to sell one or two useful players? Even if nothing like a fire sale develops, how much will the free-agency market be affected by the reduced spending power of half a dozen teams, four of which made the playoffs in 2024? Add in the half-dozen teams that are somewhere along the tanking process or are Tampa Bay, and the number of potential buyers in the market is likely to be unusually low.

And so, while all that's relative to the Blue Jays for reasons of market dynamics, it should also influence the specific tasks they have this offseason. The headline-grabbing business will be related to their potential pursuit of power hitters like Juan Soto and Pete Alonso, plus what they do with the contract status of homegrown stars Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette, but Toronto also has a lot of work to do in replacing many pieces that were raffled off at the 2024 trade deadline. They need a catcher, outfielder, useful veteran bat of some sort, and most of a bullpen - at the very least.

That kind of lengthy shopping list would be much easier to check off if there were fewer competitors on the buying side, more motivated sellers, or a little of both. And some bargains on the roster-building front would naturally leave a little extra leftover for potential big-ticket items.

The Toronto front office is already being linked as "interested" in big names like Soto, which is both not surprising and possibly meaningless. The duo of Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins has been said to have pursued a lot of big fish over the years only to end up with an empty net. Sportsnet reported this week that a potential Soto contract, thought to be at least $500 million, would be pitched to ownership as a special circumstance outside the approved payroll number, as was the case with the failed pursuit of Shohei Ohtani last winter.

While that sounds like a tough sell - as good as he is, Soto isn't an elite combo hitter-pitcher, nor does he have the Japanese star's massive overseas following - it at least suggests Jays management is serious about trying to quickly refashion a contender after last year's unexpected collapse.

But actually doing so is another matter. Even if the Jays are willing to offer Guerrero a contract that dwarfs previous franchise records in terms of length and value, he could opt to test free agency. And even if the team does dangle megadeals in front of various marquee free agents, Toronto's unlikely to be anyone's first choice, no matter how many well-placed media leaks suggest the Jays are serious contenders for someone like Soto.

The good news for Jays fans is there won't be any uncertainty about TV contracts in their future. Rogers Communications owns the ball club and controls broadcast rights through its own network. Whatever happens with the TV landscape in the coming years, the corporate parent will always benefit from having a competitive team - especially after Rogers boosted its interest in sports ownership with its planned takeover of MLSE.

The bad news is that management still has to get players to take its money.

"We have a stable media-rights landscape" isn't, on its own, a very compelling pitch to a free agent.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.