The Nationals announced Wednesday that they’re stepping away from their local broadcasting deal with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network. Major League Baseball will handle in-market distribution via streaming on the league’s MLB.tv platform and through yet to be announced cable/satellite partnerships. Chelsea Janes of The Washington Post and Mark Zuckerman of MASNsports.com were among those to cover the news.
“Today’s announcement represents a new chapter for Washington Nationals baseball,” owner Mark Lerner said in a press release. “Partnering with MLB offers us several new opportunities that will greatly improve the on-air product, including technological enhancements, the ability to work more closely with our broadcasters, and create added opportunities for our valued corporate partners.”
It officially concludes a fraught relationship with MASN, the network which had been jointly owned by the Nationals and Orioles since the former relocated to D.C. in 2005. Those two decades were marred by disputes over rights fees. The Orioles held a majority stake in the network as a condition of the Nationals relocating into their geographic territory. The sides went to arbitration to resolve calculations over rights fees, and the uncertainty was reportedly a stumbling block in the Lerner family’s efforts to sell the Nationals in 2022. The enmity also kept the teams from making any trades with one another.
David Rubenstein purchased the Orioles from the Angelos family two years later. That allowed for a fresh start in negotiations that resulted in a deal last March resolving all past disputes and settling on fees for the 2025 season. The agreement provided that the Nats could explore other opportunities in ’26.
This comes as the RSN model continues its decline around the league. The Nationals are the seventh team to turn broadcasts over to MLB. The Diamondbacks, Padres, Twins, Guardians, Rockies and Mariners have also done so. Those clubs don’t have the certainty of fixed rights fees because their previous providers were unable to meet their contractual obligations. Most of those organizations had agreements with Main Street Sports, the corporation that operates the FanDuel Sports (formerly Bally Sports) Networks.
Main Street Sports is back in hot water. The company recently missed payments to the Marlins and Cardinals. That led all nine teams that had agreements with Main Street to pull out of their contracts last week. Main Street is seeking a buyer and has otherwise said it plans to shutter operations at the end of the NBA and NHL seasons, which would leave the nine MLB teams in limbo. Evan Drellich of The Athletic writes that Main Street is hoping to renegotiate three-year deals with MLB clubs that would run through the 2028 season. Those could involve a hybrid arrangement that includes some fixed fees and a revenue sharing agreement that responds to the broadcaster’s loss of profits as consumers continue to move away from cable.
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