The Nationals announced Wednesday that they are abandoning their local broadcast deal with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network. Major League Baseball will handle the market’s distribution via live streaming on the league’s MLB.tv and until announced cable/satellite partnerships. Chelsea Janes of The Washington Post and Mark Zuckerman of MASNsports.com were among those to report the news.
“Today’s announcement represents a new chapter for Washington Nationals baseball,” owner Mark Lerner said in a press release. “Partnering with MLB provides us with many new opportunities that will greatly enhance the on-air product, including technological improvements, the ability to work closely with our broadcasters, and create additional opportunities for our key corporate partners.”
It officially ends a strained relationship with MASN, the network that has been jointly owned by the Nationals and the Orioles since it moved to DC in 2005. Those twenty years were marred by disputes over rights fees. The Orioles played a major role in the network as a condition for the Nationals to move into their position. The sides moved to settle the rights money figure, and the uncertainty reportedly became a stumbling block in the Lerner family’s efforts to sell the Nationals in 2022. This enmity also prevented the groups from doing any trade with each other.
David Rubenstein bought the Orioles from the Angelos family two years later. That allowed a fresh start in negotiations that led to an agreement last March to resolve all past disputes and settle payments for the 2025 season. The deal provided that the Nats could explore other opportunities in ’26.
This comes as the RSN model continues its decline across the league. The Nationals are the seventh team to switch broadcasts in MLB. The Diamondbacks, Padres, Twins, Guardians, Rockies and Mariners have also done so. Those clubs are not guaranteed fixed rights fees because their previous suppliers could not meet their contractual obligations. Most of those organizations had deals with Main Street Sports, the organization that operates the FanDuel Sports (formerly Bally Sports) Networks.
Main Street Sports is back in hot water. The company recently lost payments to the Marlins and Cardinals. That led to all nine groups that had agreements with Main Street pulling out of their contracts last week. Main Street is looking for a buyer and has said it otherwise plans to close operations at the end of the NBA and NHL seasons, which would leave MLB’s nine teams in limbo. Evan Drellich of The Athletic writes that Main Street hopes to renegotiate three-year contracts with MLB clubs that will continue through the 2028 season. That could involve a hybrid plan that includes some fixed fees and a profit-sharing deal that responds to the broadcaster’s loss of profits as consumers continue to move away from cable.
