The Los Angeles Angels finally have their answer.
According to the Orange County Register’s Jeff Fletcher, the Angels have completed a deal to launch their own TV network, doing so by purchasing a portion of Main Street Sports Group rather than taking the path most of their former FanDuel colleagues chose and handing the keys over to MLB.
SoCal fans who previously had access to FanDuel won’t need to do anything differently — the new network will be available at no additional cost, with streaming through MLB’s direct-to-consumer platform available for everyone else and out-of-market viewers left unchanged. The broadcast crew will remain unchanged, and the network will be ready when the regular season opens, even if Angels fans — much to the dismay of Alanna Rizzo and Ken Rosenthal — had to spend spring training without a single game on television while ownership sorted out the details.
The Angels’ broadcast situation has been in flux since January, when all nine MLB clubs still under contract with Main Street terminated their deals after a proposed sale to London-based streaming platform DAZN collapsed. Six of those teams — the Brewers, Marlins, Rays, Royals, Cardinals, and Reds — moved almost immediately under MLB’s centralized media operation, handing off production and distribution to the league and moving on with their lives.
The Angels and Tigers were the two clubs that held out, their plans publicly unresolved as pitchers and catchers reported and spring training games started without either team having a clear answer for their fans. The Tigers broke first, as Ilitch Sports + Entertainment announced the launch of Detroit SportsNet this week, a platform powered by MLB Media that will carry Tigers and Red Wings games starting this season.
The Angels, as is their custom, took a little longer.
Unlike the teams that plugged into MLB’s infrastructure, the Angels needed to buy out Main Street’s stake in FanDuel Sports Network West before they could stand up their own operation. That process took long enough that reports emerged of the Angels asking MLB for additional time before committing to the league’s media arm. The cost of that extra time showed up in spring training.
As recently as two weeks ago, the Angels had no Cactus League games on television — not one — while ownership finished working through the details of a deal that clearly wasn’t ready yet. The Braves, who pursued their own standalone network and have since launched BravesVision, found a partner in Gray Media to carry 15 spring training games free over the air while their infrastructure came together. The Angels had no such bridge, and a fanbase that had already absorbed years of payroll constraints and Arte Moreno publicly blaming declining TV revenue for the team’s limited spending had to watch spring training through whatever the opposing club happened to be broadcasting.
The deal getting done before Opening Day is the bare minimum, but after months of being starved of good news, Angels fans will take it.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.