Local sports are moving onto free broadcast networks and streaming platforms rather than the cable networks where they lived for years, and no sport is being hurt more by that evolution than baseball.
Yet Colin Cowherd, who called minor league baseball at the start of his career and now works for the company that broadcasts the World Series, believes MLB will actually benefit in the long run because of the collapse of these regional sports networks.
In the latest episode of The Colin Cowherd Podcast, the FS1 host called the RSNs “dead” and admitted that, due to decreased local TV revenues, the “bottom has fallen out of the sport.”
However, Cowherd believes that the rich getting richer may not be such a bad thing for MLB.
“Baseball is going to go through a really good decade,” Cowherd said. “The gap between the haves and the have-nots … has gotten wider, and it’s actually helped baseball.”
Why? Because if the biggest markets are increasingly the only teams that can afford Shohei Ohtani or Juan Soto, that guarantees a consolidation of power and more MLB super-teams like we saw in this year’s World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees.
“If you can combine teams that become the Warriors with KD, star-driven Philadelphia, New York, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, it actually works for this sport,” Cowherd argued.
That led Cowherd to support the controversial “Golden At-Bat,” a rule that commissioner Rob Manfred recently said MLB was considering. The rule would give teams the ability to insert a hitter of choice once per game at a key moment.
From a fan standpoint, Cowherd believes that if those top players are on the most popular teams and given more opportunities in big spots with the Golden At-Bat, it shows that baseball is thinking the right way.
“The best players are on the biggest brands and in the biggest markets, and it helps,” Cowherd said. “Markets matter except for the NFL, so with that premise, baseball is in a good spot.”
Even if MLB doesn’t adopt the Golden At-Bat, Cowherd is bullish that the sport can capitalize on the viewership spike during this year’s postseason and an uptick in star power on its most famous teams.
