Marquee Network Notes: On-Air Talent, Content Plans, Carriage, Impact on Baseball Budget

Today at the Cubs Convention, the Cubs made a variety of announcements about the upcoming Marquee Sports Network, the new TV home of the Cubs.

For one thing, the Cubs have secured 22 more carriage deals for the channel – RCN was the big one mentioned today – given them a total of 25 deals in place, and getting close to having just about everything locked down … except for Comcast:

For complicated reasons we recently explored, the Comcast negotiation was always going to be a tough one, and was always likely to push into February. Eventually, a deal is expected.

Deals are also expected, eventually, with the various streaming services in-market (YouTube TV, Hulu, Sling, etc.), and those negotiations are also taking place.

Meanwhile, Marquee’s talent lineup is really robust, with Len and JD, of course, returning, as well as a lot of familiar names and faces:

As for content on the network, obviously you’ll have Cubs games (current and archived), pre-and-post, analysis, features on players, etc. But today, the Cubs added that there will also be minor league games and content, as well as the ability to pull other sports content from some college conferences, pro soccer, and more. We’ll see what the mix looks like in the months ahead, but I expect there will be a lot of trial and error in the early days.

Separately, I had an opportunity to talk to Cubs Business President Crane Kenney about the network. He said that, yes, the primary focus in creating this channel was to be able to do things – from a content perspective – that they weren’t realistically able to do when sharing an RSN with three other sports teams. But, even if that is the primary focus for creating their own network, Kenney conceded that there is a financial component to the decision, too: a successful launch this year in 2020 would impact what is available for the baseball budget in 2021 (and beyond).

That stuck out to me, of course, together with Theo Epstein’s near-admission this morning that what we suspect The 2020 Plan to be is correct. If you were thinking that more revenue was going to be available to spend in your 2021 baseball budget, wouldn’t that be just another reason to reset your luxury tax penalty this year (in conjunction with trying to acquire more long-term talent through trades)? Because then spending well over the luxury tax next year – if you elected to do so – would “cost” dramatically less, and more effective dollars could actually go onto the field. I don’t think the timing of the TV money is driving what the Cubs chose to do in 2020 any more than the other individual reasons for how the Cubs are proceeding, but it stuck out to me today as yet another element that syncs up.

In any case, it’s all the more reason for the Cubs to make sure they get Marquee carried by Comcast for this season.

written by

Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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