Major League Baseball television contracts
The following is a detailed description of the various television networks (both broadcast and cable), rights fees, and announcers who have called Major League Baseball games throughout the years (from the late 1930s through the present).
Terrestrial television:
Sportsnet and Réseau des sports (RDS) are the current national rightsholders, in English and French respectively, to Major League Baseball, and both air a variety of regular-season games (which do not always correspond to those carried nationally in the U.S.) as well as the All-Star Game and the postseason. In the past these rights were held by The Score (2001–2002), TSN (1990–2000), and CTV (1981–1996). In 2010, Sportsnet began subleasing its rights to Sunday Night Baseball to rival TSN2, in return for TSN yielding its remaining rights to Toronto Blue Jays games to Sportsnet.
As presently the only MLB team in Canada, all Blue Jays games are also aired nationally in that country. These rights are negotiated by the team itself, not MLB, with all games currently airing on the co-owned Sportsnet and Sportsnet One in English, while TVA Sports has French-language rights to selected Blue Jays games. Other Canadian broadcasters have carried these games in the past, with TSN being the team's main carrier from 1984 to 1998 (and in a lesser role until 2009), and CBC and CTV also providing national coverage of some games at various points over the course of the team's history.
In 1953, ABC-TV executive Edgar J. Scherick (who would later go on to create Wide World of Sports) broached a Saturday Game of the Week-TV sport's first network series. At the time, ABC was labeled a "nothing network" that had fewer outlets than CBS or NBC. ABC also needed paid programming or "anything for bills" as Scherick put it. At first, ABC hesitated at the idea of a nationally televised regular season baseball program. ABC wondered how exactly the Game of the Week would reach television in the first place and who would notice if it did. In April 1953, Edgar Scherick set out to sell teams rights but instead, only got the Philadelphia Athletics, Cleveland Indians, and Chicago White Sox to sign on. To make matters worse, Major League Baseball barred the Game of the Week from airing within 50 miles of any ballpark. Major League Baseball according to Scherick, insisted on protecting local coverage and didn't care about national appeal. ABC though, did care about the national appeal and claimed that "most of America was still up for grabs."
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