The Nationals are now officially part of Major League Baseball’s in-house structure to produce and distribute local games, becoming the seventh team to do so. Before spring training, though, they could have plenty of additional company.
Washington made the highly expected announcement Wednesday, saying it will join MLB Media for its local games, beginning next month. The move arrived after the Nationals early last year ended a bitter, two-decade fight with the Orioles-controlled Mid-Atlantic Sports Network. That settlement involved the Nationals remaining on MASN for a final season in 2025, which they did.
Since then, the club has evaluated a series of options, ultimately landing for the time being on the league-led structure that also includes the Diamondbacks, Guardians, Padres, Rockies, Twins, and most recently, the Mariners.
The new Nationals.TV will be available online, and with a set of cable and satellite providers to be announced. Mark Lerner, the team’s managing principal owner, called the move “a new chapter for Washington Nationals baseball.”
Parallel Issues
As the Nationals make the move into MLB Media, more teams could soon join them, depending on the outcome of the embattled Main Street Sports Group.
The operator of FanDuel Sports Network, which shows nine MLB clubs, is on the brink of a potential collapse, with a proposed deal with DAZN now looking increasingly unlikely. Without that agreement, it’s quite possible that Main Street Sports will shut itself down—shifting the local rights of those teams, and 20 more across the NBA and NHL, back to those franchises and their leagues.
Main Street Sports recently missed the scheduled rights payments for many of its clubs, heightening tension around the issue and prompting all nine of the MLB clubs to terminate their deals.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said last week the league is ready to take on any or all of those Main Street Sports clubs into the in-house structure. Among those affected are the Tigers, currently in the midst of a high-stakes arbitration battle with star pitcher Tarik Skubal.
“Our focus, particularly given the point in the calendar, is to maximize the revenue that’s available to the clubs, whether that’s MLB Media or a third party,” Manfred said in response to a Front Office Sports question.
MASN’s viability, meanwhile, is now also in increasing question after the Nationals’ departure. The inclusion of the team’s local rights was a key part of the settlement between MLB and then–Orioles owner Peter Angelos that helped pave the way for the relocation of the Expos to become the Nationals. Last year’s agreement put an end point on that, but now MASN will have just one major league team on the network.
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