A bankruptcy judge approved Diamond Sports Group’s request to shed its contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks, prompting Major League Baseball to step in, beginning with the team’s game against the Atlanta Braves on Tuesday.

Like it did upon taking over the San Diego Padres’ broadcasts at the end of May, MLB will make D-backs games available blackout-free through its streaming service, MLB.TV, and will provide a linear cable option on different channels through Cox, DirecTV, Spectrum and Comcast Xfinity. Other providers such as Mediacom, Orbitel, TDS and Optimum/Suddenlink will also carry D-backs games, as will the streaming service Fubo.

A spokesperson for Diamond Sports said its contract with the D-backs—a reported 20-year, $1.5 billion deal that began in 2015—“had financial terms that were not aligned with its long-term plans.”

...Today, though, there remains a basic math problem. As these deals escalated in value over the past decade, the networks paying the fees started to lose subscribers, and those losses worsened as cord-cutting accelerated in recent years.

The company most affected has been Bally Sports, which is owned by a subsidiary of Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair took on around $8 billion in debt to buy around 20 networks in 2019. Bally Sports owned the rights to 42 MLB, NBA and NHL teams before its bankruptcy filing…