Here’s Kansas City Royals owner John Sherman on fans’ frustration with Bally’s TV deal
John Sherman knew the topic would come up. He’s the Royals’ owner and his team is unavailable on TV to many fans.
Talking with a local sports columnist means knowing this will be asked, so Sherman brought it up on his own.
“You’ve written about what we’re dealing with with Sinclair,” he said. “We obviously want to increase our reach. We want all our fans to be able to access this game. Sinclair’s our partner, we want to be supportive of them, and help being our partner and doing that.”
Navigating the Royals through COVID-19 is on a whole separate level, but other than that, this is the most important and most public problem of Sherman’s first 17 months in charge of his hometown baseball team.
And the conflict is right there in Sherman’s words — he knows this is a rotten situation, he obviously wants all fans to be able to see his team’s games, and he has a binding contract and partnership with Sinclair that he has to honor.
At the moment, this means the Royals are stuck serving two critically important parties — fans and a TV partner — who simply are not connecting.
“There’s ways you can get our games if you want them,” Sherman said. “We certainly encourage people (to find those ways). We’re also encouraging Sinclair to do all they can to negotiate with the streamers, and MLB is certainly focused on that, as well.
“We want Sinclair to be successful. We’re financial partners with them on this. But yeah, we have some frustration with the result, whether it’s YouTube or Hulu and the issues that are going on, that those fans not seeing our games right now.”
The rollout of Bally Sports Kansas City has been not dissimilar from a disaster. We’ll spend most of this column talking about the availability of game broadcasts, but the company’s social media account used an Indiana Pacers hashtag in a post about the Royals, Google Fiber put the game on the wrong channel, and the score-box graphic is a mess.
Some of this can be graciously forgiven — every opening day has glitches — but Bally Sports has done the opposite of ingratiating itself to Royals fans.
Let’s do a quick two-paragraph synopsis of the main current problem: Royals and Sporting Kansas City games are on Bally Sports Kansas City, which is rebranded from Fox Sports Kansas City after being purchased by Sinclair Broadcasting.
Bally Sports is available on cable, but a growing number of millions of households across the country do not have cable. For cord-cutters in Kansas City the only options to seeing the Royals on TV are with AT&T TV or via a few back-alley routes involving illegal streams or fooling MLB TV’s blackout restrictions with a VPN.
That means the vast majority of non-cable households are inconvenienced at best, insulted at worst, and this is simply unsustainable. Those are not Sherman’s words. He didn’t say that. Those are my words.
Here are more:
A baseball team survives and thrives only to the extent to which it appeals to fans, and right now a significant chunk of fans have every reason to believe their love for the Royals is not reciprocated.
The current situation is unsustainable because something like 10 to 30 percent of fans — and these are disproportionately young fans, the kind of fans that are disproportionately important — are being shut out from watching their team on TV.
But, again. Sherman knows this.
“Our priority is reach over revenue,” Sherman said. “A lot of times people might think we’re short-sighted on that, but it’s really way more important that we expand our reach. We think at the end of the day, with national media dollars and regional stuff, it may be in different buckets but we have to find a way to make sure we’re appealing to a younger audience.
“We may go through a period of time where revenues actually go through adjustment but we think the money will come back if we focus on expanding our reach and not just increasing revenue.”
The truth is the Royals don’t have a great option this season. They expected wider distribution, but this is a flaw of the regional sports network model — teams hand over production rights to what is essentially a middle man, and then trust that middle man’s business interests will align with their own.
The Royals are not alone here, by the way. St. Louis and Boston are among the markets with similar conflicts. The Dodgers went through years of their games being unavailable to large portions of Los Angeles. The NBA and NHL use the same model, similar problems pop up.
We feel this deeply in Kansas City because the Royals are beloved here. Their TV ratings outperform their on-field record when they’re not good, and when they are good they can get local numbers that rival NFL games.
Again: This is unacceptable, and that’s true for both the Royals and their fans.
Sherman is about 17 months into his ownership, so we’re still getting to know his leadership and priorities. But his words on this include clear frustration.
Sporting Kansas City CEO Jake Reid called the deal “not what we signed up for,” and while Sherman did not go that far in a conversation I had with him, it’s obvious this isn’t what’s best for the Royals.
He left vague what “encouraging Sinclair to do all they can” means exactly, but the man who for the last year has been guided by a charge to “make sure we come out of the pandemic stronger than we went into it” is also focused on what the other side of this will look like.
“My bet is that we’ll come out stronger on this,” he said. “But we’ll go through some turbulence in the short to medium term. But I think we’ll get there.”
Sherman’s optimism comes in part because of the quality of MLB’s streaming platform — which Disney bought for billions and uses the technology for Disney+ — and the priority he sees MLB putting on this.
Sherman serves on Major League Baseball’s long-term strategic planning committee, and along with on-field aesthetics the most important charge is making the game more accessible and reaching younger fans.
That means working on MLB TV’s blackout restrictions, creating a more complete direct-to-consumer option and growing the game globally. All of this is being done at a moment in history when consumer consumption is changing at an unprecedented rate.
MLB needs the fans who won’t ever give up cable and the fans who want to stream on their own terms and the fans who will rarely watch games at all and will engage through social media.
“I talk to my dad about some of this stuff and he says, ‘That’s insane,’” Sherman said. “Then I talk to my 16-year-old grandson and he says, ‘Yeah, of course.’ We’ve been on some owners’ calls and we’re talking about some of this stuff and it’s a bunch of 60-year-olds on the call. And we need some 20-year-olds in the room, and we’re getting some 20-year-olds in the room.”
One of the frustrating parts here is that MLB should have been better positioned for this sort of situation, in part because it was a pioneer with BamTech, the platform purchased by Disney. The NHL offers a single-team streaming package that costs about 80 percent of the full-league option.
Notably, that’s only for out-of-market games, but there’s no reason MLB couldn’t do the same while including in-market games and kicking the money back to regional sports networks like Bally’s. That way, everybody wins, including fans.
That’s just one option of many, and each comes with specific benefits and problems. Sherman and others are working on it. They know the future is changing, constantly. They know they have to get this right.
At the moment, they know they have it wrong.
This story was originally published April 2, 2021 at 1:12 PM.