Seattle Mariners have a new TV situation, according to The Athletic
Nov 19, 2024, 4:37 PM
There will be changes coming to Seattle Mariners television broadcasts, though what that means for viewers is yet to be known.
According to The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, the Mariners are set to become the eighth team under MLB’s “in-house broadcasting group.”
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Does this mean TV broadcasts of Mariners games will be available beyond subscribing to a cable provider that includes ROOT Sports? That answer isn’t clear. But it does make the possibility of tuning in Mariners games in a different format more likely than before.
The Mariners have an arrangement “unique to the rest” of the teams under MLB’s broadcasting arm, according to an article by Drellich published Tuesday.
“It’s just complicated because they have distribution agreements that ran longer,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said of the Mariners, per Drellich’s article. “We’ll do the production for them, not clear how much more.”
This bit of news was just a small part of a much larger report by Drellich on MLB’s long-term TV broadcasting plans.
Seven other MLB teams will have MLB Media serve as their 2025 television broadcaster, most having come to MLB Media after Diamond Sports Media declared bankruptcy. The league is angling towards new national TV packages in 2028, according to Drellich’s report, and the MLB’s effort to pull that off will only be helped by having as many teams under its own broadcasting umbrella as possible.
ROOT Sports Northwest has been the longtime home of Mariners TV broadcasts. The Mariners initially owned a 71% stake in the regional sports television network beginning in 2013, but has owned 100% of the channel since Jan. 1, 2024.
One change that is known for the Mariners on TV in 2025 is that play-by-play broadcaster Dave Sims will no longer be a part of the announce team after he became the new radio voice of the New York Yankees last week.
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