How MLB Took Over a Regional Sports Network in 24 Hours

Alex Weprin
·5 min read

On May 30, 2023, Diamond Sports, the owner of the regional sports network Bally Sports San Diego, failed to make a payment to the Padres, one of the local teams that underpins its lineup.

That’s when Billy Chambers and his four-person team at Major League Baseball headquarters in New York stepped in.

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Twenty-four hours after the final Bally Sports San Diego-produced Padres game, MLB was producing the game itself, with the same announcers, but with new graphics, and even a dramatic sizzle opener, narrated by Bob Costas. (The former NBC Sports anchor is on contract for the MLB Network.)

“When we found out that we were going to have the game, 24 hours in advance, we sprung into action. We had meetings with the crew, with the talent, we had got all of our graphics loaded into the truck,” Chambers recalls. “Yeah, it was an absolute fire drill.”

For Chambers, it was the culmination of months of work, but also a test run for what’s to come, with other RSNs expected to fail in the coming months, and the future of the RSN business in question.

Chambers joined MLB on Feb. 1 as its first executive VP of local media. With the Bally Sports Networks in financial distress, and with uncertainty around other RSNs — Warner Bros. Discovery has told its league partners it wants to exit the business — the league wanted a team place to spring into action, in case it needed to take over the local broadcasts.

Chambers says he hired three people (all RSN veterans) and immediately began building from scratch an operation that could take over the live game broadcasts for many of MLB’s clubs.

“We started laying out a plan on what we needed to do, regardless of the team — and we certainly had an idea which teams might be coming down the pipe just on the way that bankruptcy and payments were playing out — but we needed an overall solution,” Chambers says. “If we were starting at RSN from scratch, how would we do it?”

The league would lean heavily on partners, including MLB Network, which developed graphics packages, Mobile TV Group, which operates a fleet of TV production trucks, as well as PPI, Playfly and CTS, who helped stand up the production.

“We couldn’t have done it without them,” Chambers says. “That process usually takes about six or nine months to spin up and we did it in about a month.”

The prep work was put into motion on May 31, with one of Chambers’ deputies flying down to Miami (where the Padres were playing the Miami Marlins) to oversee production of the game.

“We knew we might have that game,” Chambers said, noting the deadline for Bally Sports to make its payment. “So we had made contact with the truck, with the crew, with the team, and also with Playfly who does all of the advertising. We were in touch with them in the days beforehand, getting all the advertising elements, and we had everything to go you know as part of a big contingency plan.”

Now a couple of weeks into producing Padres games, Chambers and MLB is preparing for another wave of potential takeovers.

On June 15, the Texas Rangers are due their next rights payment from Bally. On July 1 the Cleveland Guardians, Arizona Diamondbacks and Minnesota Twins are due payments. And other teams will follow.

That is where Chambers is looking next.

“At first it was all hands on deck for the Padres, and now that we’ve kind of got the winds at our back a little bit right now, we’re two weeks in and things are moving along really smoothly,” Chambers says. “Now we’re starting to focus most of our efforts on what other potential teams might come our way, and just the contingency planning around those.”

Chambers says regardless of how many teams the league has to take over broadcasts for, his crew will remain small. The plan is to hire a coordinating producer for every team: “They’re the day to day contacts for the teams, but for the most part, I think our four person group up here has been pretty good,” he says.

A traditional RSN is 24/7 365 and we’re just lighting up the game and shutting it down,” he adds. “That’s been one of my goals is to carry a thin overhead, and I think we’re going to be able to do it.”

But that doesn’t man Chambers isn’t thinking about the future.

What happens to the RSN business is still unclear. Some may survive, others may evolve, and still others will likely disappear.

Chambers and his team have been experimenting with production techniques that hope will find their way across the sport, including the use of a shallow depth RF camera to frame dramatic shots, as well as the enhanced graphics packaged produced by MLB Network.

But there is more that can be done.

“Because of these productions being done by MLB and the Padres, we’re gonna get better access to the teams and I think that’s gonna be a great thing for the viewer,” Chambers says. “As a fan, I always love to see more interviews, or more formal or candid moments with the players, and I think that we’re in a unique position to exploit that.”

But first, Chambers and his crack MLB team need to stand ready to take over more live game productions. And MLB’s master control rooms on Avenue of the Americas in New York are ready for the challenge.

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