Comcast had dropped Diamond Sports Group’s regional sports networks (aka Bally’s) in fifteen (15!) markets nearly three months ago amidst a contract dispute. What does their settlement mean for customers who have gone without baseball all summer?

Anthony Crupi with Sportico — 

Per terms of the agreement, the RSNs will be bumped up to Comcast’s Xfinity Ultimate TV package, with a monthly subscriber fee about $20 higher than the basic tier that once housed Diamond’s local sports channels.

Let me get this straight: in the age of cord-cutting, the response to people dropping cable altogether is to ask the remaining few to pay more to watch their teams.

Among the dozen MLB clubs that had been sidelined in their hometown markets during the standoff include the Atlanta Braves, Minnesota Twins and Texas Rangers. On the whole, local baseball ratings took a 6% haircut during the impasse.

And in those markets, that means you’re asking people who have already gone without watching their teams all summer to care to pay for the final two months of the season. Good luck with that strategy.

But wait! There’s still the whole bankruptcy proceeding for Diamond Sports. What is going on there?

The successful negotiation is expected to put Diamond’s bankruptcy case back on the fast track toward rescheduling the crucial confirmation hearing that was postponed last week.

On Wednesday, Diamond counsel Brian Hermann informed the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas that the company would need a few additional days to finish cutting a deal with Comcast; originally set to take place on June 18, the twice-delayed confirmation session was supposed to have taken place earlier today.

And so, we wait.

David Satin with The Streamable —

But the league has also been crystal clear about its desire to end its relationship with its largest current RSN partner, so what comes next? Manfred gave a hint this week, saying that the league had discussed a package that nationalizes all RSN content for about half of its teams. The main reason for insisting on a nationally available product is to attract streaming providers, who want to ensure they can put as many games in front of their entire subscriber base before shelling out big money for MLB rights.

But for half of the teams? Imagine the MLS deal with Apple, but minus Seattle, LA Galaxy and Inter Miami. Why would Amazon or any streamer pick up this MLB package if it only consists of half of the teams in the league? What if one of the teams in the package is playing one of the teams outside of the package?

Earlier this year, Manfred spoke about his desire to create an in-market streaming platform which carried around half the teams in the league. This would differ somewhat from the national RSN package discussed above, as it would not be a linear TV product, and would be sold directly to consumers, rather than to a streaming provider who would then turn around and market it to the public.

This sounds more like their current product, MLB.tv, which streams every single game, every single night. The broadcasts are from each team’s respective RSN — so if the Mets and Cardinals are playing you can choose which broadcast you want to watch. Furthermore, the Padres and Diamondbacks broadcasts are currently produced by MLB after those two teams were dropped by Diamond Sports last year.

This, to me, is still the way to go. Baseball broadcasts have always been local or regional. Nationalizing every single broadcast ruins that. You would lose the depth of knowledge local broadcasters have with their respective teams. You would also lose the voice of the team — the current and future Jack Bucks, Harry Carays, Vin Scullys and Bob Ueckers of the game. The problem with the current state of MLB.tv is that local games are blacked out. This is all that needs to be fixed. But if MLB does intend on nationalizing its games, that might just spell the end for its signature streaming platform.

F-Zero is a futuristic racing game which launched with the SNES. It featured hover cars that could, among other things, recharge their energy via electrified pit lanes. If you need to recharge your vehicle, you simply pull into one of these pit lanes and keep driving.

Now this. Carolyn Fortuna at CleanTechnica—

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to charge your electric vehicle (EV) as your drive down the highway? Well, folks in Central Florida will get the chance in a couple of years on a new highway in Lake County and Orange County. In-road charging will replenish batteries of EVs as they travel along SR 516.

The first installation ever of wireless charging in concrete lanes, it will offer variable power for small electric sedans all the way to long-haul electric trucks. The system will encompass a footprint of about three-quarters of a mile.

The system will be set up to replenish the amount of energy used to drive its length. That means when you exit the charging stretch of road, you should have the same amount of battery as when you entered.

This, to me, is the true promise of EVs. Don’t let the short-sighted naysayers concern you with range anxiety or the build-out speed of charging networks. EVs can already fuel-up overnight while sitting in your garage at home. Introducing induction charging into roadways and other infrastructure will flip the naysaying on a dime to questioning why people still drive gas-powered cars.

One day we will be able charge our vehicles on the way to work; or while we sit at a stop light; or while we wait for food in a drive-thru. Which interstate will be the first to feature enough charging stretches that you could conceivably drive from NYC to LA without stopping? This is the promise that we need to stay focused on with EVs. This is the reality that is coming to fruition.

Phil Hecken with Uni-Watch—

With MLB’s annual All-Star Game taking place tonight, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred held a question and answer session with writers and said that “there will be conversations” about the potential return of individual team jerseys at the All-Star Game.

That’s about the best news we’ve heard from MLB since the Nike uniform fiasco began back early in 2024.

Indeed. Yet Manfred has been a horrible caretaker of the sport. Maybe the worst ever? Phil, again—

It would also mark a change in thinking from Manfred, the worst commissioner since segregationist/racist Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. As recently as 2022, Manfred is on record as saying, “I never thought that a baseball team wearing different jerseys in a game was a particularly appealing look for us.”

Never has one point of view explained so much. If you don’t understand why every team wearing their regular uniforms at the All-Star game is special—and appealing—then you shouldn’t be making decisions for the well-being of the sport. It explains the 2024 uniform debacle; it explains the ghost runner in extra innings; it explains the absolute dregs the sport has become.

John Shea at the San Francisco Chronicle with the revelation that the A’s will have to schedule their games around their Minor League primary tenants —

Because the A’s will be co-tenants at Sutter Health Park, they not only will use the same field as the River Cats — the top farm team of the San Francisco Giants — but will need to adhere to Pacific Coast League scheduling to fit in their 81 home games.

And why is that challenging?

Generally, the River Cats play one team per week in a six-game series with Monday set aside as a travel day. One week at home, the next on the road. The A’s need to mirror that and play in Sacramento when the River Cats are on the road and vice versa.

It’s not uncommon for the A’s to open a homestand or trip on a Friday. But now, pretty much every homestand or trip would need to begin on a Monday or Tuesday.

In other words, the 29 other teams are catering to the A’s because of owner John Fisher’s preference to leave the Coliseum, where scheduling would have been routine, for a temporary home in Sacramento, where the scheduling is complex, the heat is overwhelming and the facilities in need of major upgrades.

Wait, what was that about the heat?

Complaints aplenty are expected, including from players, because of the brutal heat. Wednesday, temperatures topped 100 degrees in Sacramento, and playing on artificial turf tends to elevate on-field temperatures. It’ll be the sixth MLB stadium with artificial turf and the only one without a roof.

The decision to play on artificial turf instead of grass was made to make the field easier to maintain with a game played virtually every day. At least 156 games will be played on the field, 81 for the A’s and 75 for the River Cats.

Remember, the move to Vegas is not guaranteed. There is no ballpark there. Considerable hurdles still need to be cleared before they can even break ground. The A’s seem like the loser gambler, pushing their luck at the roulette table. It wasn’t enough to rip the team out of Oakland, they had to double-down and burn their bridges with the city before they even got out of town. Now, to spite their face, they cut off their nose by booking a half-baked tenancy in a Minor League town.

Vegas, for their part, are the sad sacks looking the other way enabling all of this. Why should anyone there be excited that this shit show wants to come to town?

The only one coming out of this with a win is the owner of the minor league team in Sacramento, Vivek Ranadivé, who also owns the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, and would love to have a proper MLB team as well.

Ranadivé could get his wish either if the Las Vegas stadium deal falls apart or if MLB grants Sacramento an expansion team. Until further notice, this is a tryout for Ranadivé and his city to showcase to MLB that Sacramento is worthy of permanently joining the league.

Sacramento has major league ambitions. They have been on the brink of MLS expansion talk for years, actually being granted the 29th expansion team in 2019 alongside St. Louis. However, that deal fell through in 2021. This A’s situation gives the city a legitimate shot at landing an MLB team — either the A’s themselves should they decide to never leave, or a proper expansion team. They have a leg up on any other expansion city candidate, in that they will be hosting Major League Baseball for at least the next three years. Whether or not that’s fair is up for debate, but you cannot deny that Ranadivé is playing with house money for now.

Tim Reynolds at the AP —

The Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers are moving their local broadcasts to Scripps Sports, leaving financially troubled Bally Sports and bringing the club’s games into more homes on a regular basis than ever before.

Interest for the team in Miami is higher than ever and the response is not to try and funnel those eyeballs into a blackout/monetization scheme, but rather to make their games more accessible to the public. Someone in Miami gets it.

There will be over-the-air channels in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and Fort Myers markets, where viewers can watch the Panthers for most of their regular-season games and their first-round games in the NHL playoffs. Also part of the deal: games on basic cable and satellite, as well as offerings on a new team-branded, direct-to-consumer streaming app. The app will be ready in October for the start of the 2024-25 season, the Panthers said.

“We want to ensure that we’re addressing the heightened demand for our team and our sport, and we want to accelerate that growth,” Mark Zarthar, the Panthers’ chief strategy officer, said Tuesday. “And so, what is the next big step for us is making the viewership of our games much more accessible? With Scripps as an over-the-air provider, they will help us reach over 2.6 million households.”

With over-the-air channels being accessible by anyone, and now having the ability to transmit 4K content, this is the correct move. Providing an app for fans who are traveling or live out of town is a fair compliment to the free offering in-region. The question is, will it work?

Florida will become the third NHL team to partner with Scripps, joining Vegas and Utah.

“We found a partner that not only can provide us with a tremendous amount of reach and accessibility, but they’ve proven that they can do it because it works in Vegas,” Zarthar said.

With Vegas being a new-ish market, and Utah being completely new, we can’t yet say this will prove to be a winning strategy. The novelty of hockey in Utah is going to inflate their numbers for a couple of years. But getting data from more than just one team will go a long way towards helping other sports teams determine if they can follow a similar course.

Along with the Dallas Stars efforts to move away from Diamond Sports, it will be interesting to watch these marketing experiments play out in real time. But so far, the underlying foundation to these new strategies involves being able to maximize reach and eliminate blackouts. Better late than never.

The Dallas Stars are taking their local game broadcasts directly to consumers for free after years of fans having issues watching the team’s games on a regional sports network.

Baffling that any team would take issue with their fans not being able to watch their product.

“After years of researching the right solution and careful planning with our partners at APMC, we’re proud to announce this pioneering streaming platform that will literally change the game for sports distribution on VICTORY+,” Dallas Stars President and CEO Brad Alberts said in a statement. “Our first priority has always been our fan base, and on VICTORY+ fans will be able to stream 100 percent of Stars content for free through this innovative and unique streaming platform for sports programming.”

Take note, this is how you do it. Inside your region, your fans should always have access to your games. Blackouts have been archaic since their inception.

Bally had the rights to 70 of the Stars’ 82 regular-season games last season and the first round of the playoffs. But Bally Sports Southwest wasn’t available on many popular streaming platforms, and there were times when fans had issues trying to watch games on an app.

It remains to be seen what the experience of the new Dallas/VICTORY+ service will be like, but taking the position of treating your fans like humans instead of criminals is a good place to start.

Fascinating forensic read by Ari Daniel at NPR.

Beethoven is well-known to have gone deaf as he aged, but that, and other ailments, were all likely due to lead poisoning.

When someone is exposed to lead, some of the harmful metal gets deposited in their hair. This means that even without a blood sample, scientists can use someone’s hair to determine their lead levels posthumously.

So the owner of two separate locks of Beethoven’s hair put something like two or three dozen strands in a special collection kit and shipped it to the Mayo Clinic — where Sarah Erdahl, Technical Coordinator at the Metals Lab, received it.

The result?

The lead levels, on the other hand, were a startling 64 to 95 times higher than the hair of someone today.

[Paul] Jannetto [director of the Metals Laboratory at the Mayo Clinic] says that even for people of his time period, the lead levels in Beethoven’s hair would have been about 10 times higher than average. “What this showed is he had a chronic exposure to high concentrations of lead,” he says.

The lead wouldn’t have killed him, but it likely contributed to his health problems.

“A lot of those documented ailments that Beethoven had,” says Jannetto, “those are traditional signs and symptoms that a neurologist or clinician could see in a patient that was exposed to lead.” These include liver disease (which would have been aggravated by his genetic risk factor, regular drinking, and infection with hepatitis B), gastrointestinal challenges, and hearing loss.

Amazing. Generations of people thought they knew for a fact that Beethoven slowly went deaf as he aged. It turns out he is a poster boy for lead poisoning. You have to wonder: had they connected the dots in his age, would lead poisoning have been named for him in a similar fashion to ALS being known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease?

Lizzy Becherano of ESPN with The Prime Reason—

As such, leagues from around the world have curated their schedules to allow players the opportunity to report for international duty in the summer without affecting their own on-field products. But not Major League Soccer. The American league is not pausing during the international window, instead forcing its clubs to play through the Copa, Euros and Olympics with incomplete rosters.

Teams may face up to six games without key players — 18% of the MLS regular season — much to the chagrin of some coaches and players. With many stars leaving their clubs, and some teams having to compete for fan interest with Copa América matches in the same city, it raises the question: Why is MLS playing through the summer instead of taking a break?

Precisely. Why?

Brad Pursel, MLS senior vice president of game schedule management, provides a clue—

“Why play through Copa América? That’s a fair question,” he told ESPN. “We have historically played through such competitions. Last year we played through the Gold Cup. This year with Copa América being here, we have to play through it as well so we can maximize the MLS match dates within the footprint of our season. Is it ideal? Certainly not.

Your history is filled with dumb decisions, such as a countdown clock and shootout wins. You obviously understand this is not ideal. Why do you keep trying to fit a square peg in a round hole?

Phile Neville, coach of the Portland Timbers makes a cogent argument about the simple unfairness to it all—

“Look at Inter Miami: when you play them in an international window with a galaxy of stars that they’ve got — or one in particular — you’re going to have a better chance of getting a result than when he’s not there … If you catch a team not at full strength, then you can catch three points. And then another team faces a complete roster later in the season. It just doesn’t seem fair.”

2023 Goalkeeper of the Year, Roman Bürki of St. Louis CITY gets it—

“If we are playing through it, and with all due respect, who is going to watch our games?” Bürki asked. “I don’t know how the schedule will be in the World Cup but it’s something the league should think about and make some changes. The World Cup players are gone for a long time. Teams that have actually invested money to bring in these players and have a good team with national team figures, it’s not fair for them too.”

Here’s the thing. I like soccer. I like MLS. I want MLS to succeed. But there is a certain point where defining success is going to mean eschewing all the old quirks of the league and joining the global community.

One of MLS’s goals is to be a top league in the world. That cannot happen while they continue to be the oddball misfit that wants to play by their own rules. Meanwhile, top leagues around the world adhere to a systematic process of the calendar year. The rest of the world doesn’t even have to take a break for Copa or the Euros right now because they are all in between seasons. There is no break when you are not playing. That’s why these tournaments are held at this time of the year.

It’s not just these summer international tournaments that wreak havoc on MLS. Every transfer window, in which players can transfer teams, is set up around the same systematic process. With MLS’s wrong-footed type of season that starts in the Winter, players routinely get transferred into the league when they are only midway through their current league’s season. I cannot imagine the mental fortitude it must take for players to go from building up stats and storylines for a half season to completely starting over like none of the previous 4 months mattered at all.

We’re routinely told, as Brad Pursel reminds us above, that the 34 games in an MLS season is a tall task to work around. Yet other top leagues in the world, such as England’s Premier League, play more games (38) despite having less teams. So how is it that 34 MLS games results in a more congested schedule than 38 Premier League games?

We’re also routinely told the double-farce that MLS has to hold its games when it does because:

1. They want to avoid forcing Northern teams to play in the winter.
2. They don’t want to go up against the NFL, and so, avoid any seasonal overlap at all costs.

The 2023 season started February 25 and finished up with MLS Cup Final on December 9. I could be wrong but the only month in 2023 that MLS didn’t play is January! So much for scheduling the season to keep northern teams from having to play home games in the cold and snow. The tradeoff by doing so is that it forces the league to play in hot-climate cities in the middle of the summer. Arguably this is less ideal. If MLS were truly trying to find a solution it would see its northern-most, snow-prone teams make southern trips through the U.S. during cold winter months.

For all the hand-wringing about not wanting to go up against the NFL in-season, by December 9, 2023 the NFL was in Week 14 of an 18-week season! You heard that right: during the most important part of the MLS season (season end, playoffs, championship game) they are ceding eyeballs to the NFL (as well as NCAA Football) every single week.

So if its own scheduling reasons don’t make sense; and if it is out of step with the rest of the world, why does MLS continue down this road?

It baffles the mind.