You've Gotta Rate: Why the Splashy Move and the Daring Rule Change Are the Way of the Future

Don't get it twisted: It has always been important to make good TV, in order to make money in TV. Beginning around the year 2000, when MLB settled in as a cable product and teams started making deals to sell their broadcast rights to various partners for production and distribution, it did matter how good they were, and how much fans wanted to watch them. The more urgent and widespread that demand was, the more teams could charge for their rights—because their partners knew they would have more willing, even clamorous buyers when they turned around to sell the product to cable and satellite providers.

For a while, though, that need was somewhat ill-defined, and it could be inelastic over a period of several years. If a team struck a 10-year rights deal, they could afford to be pretty bad for about the first half of that deal, without seeing it materially affect the fees they could command the next time that deal came up for renewal. That was because, while flagging ratings might destabilize some of the relationships between RSNs and cable or satellite providers, both the networks and the carriers needed inventory, as much as they needed hits. Cable companies knew well that their customers retained their services partially for access to live sports, but also for constant access to something—as opposed to access to any particular thing. When cable was a fairly affordable product and people paid for it fairly blithely, the idea was just to keep them vaguely satisfied with the options they found whenever they pulled up the guide on their screens.

Of course, we know what happened, over time. Cable's need for inventory and the increasing appetite for high-caliber programming led to more expensive shows being produced there, and the networks producing those shows then started fighting for higher carriage fees. So did live sports networks, and after a few years of having those cost increases passed on to them in monolithic blocks, customers began to balk. Not wanting to lose clients, the carriers turned around and passed the complaints they were getting right back to the entities who (they felt) had caused them in the first place: networks, including and especially RSNs.

Ever since that happened, there has been a steady and inexorable climb in the need to rate well to make money airing sports on TV. While even some big-market teams have had nasty carriage disputes, note that neither the Yankees nor the Dodgers have ever come off the air in large swaths of their markets. The Red Sox don't have this problem, either. Although the corporate greed and incompetence of Diamond Sports Group and distribution partner Sinclair Media are not to be overlooked or forgotten, they're not the main reason why RSNs ran into trouble. That writing has been on the wall since before they entered the picture.

If you're not relentlessly entertaining—which, in sports, usually just means winning, but more on that in a bit—then people will not relentlessly pay for your entertainment product. Ever since carriers started demanding lower carriage fees or bumping RSNs to premium tiers and a la carte sections of their offerings, the year-to-year sensitivity of medium-term profitability from TV has skyrocketed. Now, with teams (including the Twins) abandoning the cable model almost altogether and selling Twins.TV directly to consumers, that elasticity has gone through the roof like Willy Wonka in that glass elevator.

How much money can you make broadcasting your team's games? Exactly as much as you earn by being a lot of fun to watch. This is not a problem unique to the Twins, and to their credit, the entire sport has realized it, too. It's an insatiable need to rate that helped bring about the shift ban and the pitch timer in 2023. It's also why, for some teams, there are considerations percolating that go beyond simply winning and losing.

Because, yes, it is possible to win in boring ways—and even to lose in interesting ones. That doesn't mean that any front office is out to play really exciting, really bad baseball. The most enduring and reliable way to draw eyes and sell subscriptions is to win. It's just that we're likely to keep seeing teams chase the splash, a bit. When Dan Hayes of The Athletic writes that the Twins are considering a trade for Dylan Cease, despite the reasons why it might seem far-fetched or even nonsensical, keep this in mind: We now live in an era where you have to rate.

Few teams have properly adjusted to this, so far. In the next half-decade, that will change. There will probably be more rules changes, although they might be minor ones, compared to those that went into effect in 2023. There will probably be playoff and league expansion, not to create more inventory for national postseason broadcast partners (that was the old reason), but to give each team's fan base longer to believe that they might be in contention. There will probably be less tanking, not because owners or front offices are getting any less cynical, but because it's a pretty bad idea in a world where your broadcast revenue fluctuates right along with your ticket sales—and that's the world toward which we're hurtling.

There will also be fewer quiet offseasons and trade deadlines, though that change might take longer. Generally speaking, billionaires keep "spend money to make money" far down their list of go-to expressions. They have plenty of money, thank you, and would like it to make them more money without their having to spend anything, really. Still, in the long run, we'll see teams contemplate bigger moves, and become much less likely to go long stretches without making any. Fans are alive all 12 months of the year, and they're always making decisions about whether to keep subscribing to their team's streaming service.

Teams will eventually have to grasp that moves like the two Carlos Correa signings and the Pablo López trade (yes, even that one, which surely angered as many fans as it thrilled when it first happened) have value that extends beyond the games they help the team win. Those wins definitely matter, but so does getting to wins in exciting, interesting ways. The future is, blessedly, a bit more elastic, and that should make baseball teams have a little more fun.