A disappointing report from the Sun-Times, which indicates a whole lot of Cubs spring broadcasts this year will be called remotely:
Boog and JD will be out in Arizona for the first weekend of games, and it sounds like some other weekend times throughout the month (or other broadcasters in person). But most of the remaining games will be called remotely, including by The Score’s Zach Zaidman and Iowa Cubs broadcaster Alex Cohen.
I don’t like it, as you definitely do not get the full and same perspective of a game from remote broadcasters (not their fault, of course, since they just can’t quite see everything). Yeah, these are just Spring Training games, and the game-calling is a bit less important than in an August or September pennant race. Still, with a dedicated Cubs channel, you are always going to want more and better coverage than you might get with some other setup. That’s part of the promise of having a Marquee Sports Network.
I also don’t like anything that hints at cost-cutting, especially at the margins, because we WANT to believe that the Cubs and Marquee are at least SOMEWHAT insulated from the broader deterioration of the RSN market. Not completely insulated, mind you, but at least somewhat. I don’t want to see too much erosion there, and at-the-margins cost-cutting just feels like it could be a bad sign.
But I suppose there are some important bits of context to keep in mind:
- We’re still only a few years into Marquee doing the whole Spring Training slate, which was a very new thing – it wasn’t that long ago that we’d be lucky to get seven or eight spring games broadcast at all. Assuming full in-person production for all games was probably a bit more than we were ever going to get – keep in mind, a lot of the road games over the past few years haven’t had in-person booths, so that part isn’t entirely new.
- Neither is the part where guest broadcasters fill in. That’s how it’s always been, and honestly I think it’s great that some other broadcasters attached to the organization get a chance to do it. To that point, the Sun-Times report indicates that broadcaster availability is at least part of the equation here, too.
- Because of the Diamond Bankruptcy and Bally RSN woes, there is going to be a dramatic scaling back of productions all over Arizona this spring. Why does that matter? Marquee, like other RSNs, used to piggyback on those productions for a lot of their road coverage the last couple years. Now Marquee has to do the video production on those games, which I expect means a big cost jump. Per the Sun-Times report, some of the decision to do remote broadcasts was about saving expenses, and I would bet anything that this was how Marquee decided to offset the increase in production costs (i.e., opted for producing all games with less in-person coverage, rather than have no broadcast of some games at all).
- Marquee and the Cubs are not synonymous, so I suppose I should also take a breath on the cost aspect before I go making wild assumptions about what kind of cash flow Marquee is or is not able to generate, and what kind of impact that has on Cubs revenues, much less the Cubs’ baseball budget. Don’t get me wrong, it’s likely good for baseball spending when Marquee is doing very well. But I want to be careful about suggesting that cost-cutting – or cost-rebalancing, as it might actually be – at Marquee means the Cubs’ payroll suddenly has a new cap. That isn’t necessarily true, nor should we necessarily accept that one-to-one as fans. The luxury tax should not be a hard cap for the Cubs. Period.
So, in the end, it’s all a bit of a mixed bag. I don’t think this necessarily warrants a freak out, but less-impactful game coverage in the Spring is always going to be disappointing. I’m glad there is no indication that we’ll get fewer games, and at least local fans without a cable subscription this year will now have the option of subscribing to Marquee via the app. More games in front of more fans should be the highest goal of all of this.
Now we’ll just have to wait to see what the productions actually look and feel like throughout spring, and then how things go in the regular season (the report indicates there is not expected to be any regular season impact here).
(Feature photo by Allan Henry-USA TODAY Sports.)