Major League Baseball is less than three weeks into its regular season, and five of the 14 teams under Diamond Sports Group's umbrella are currently missing payments.
The Cincinnati Reds and the Texas Rangers recently joined the Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Guardians and Minnesota Twins among those who have not been paid their most recent rights fees by Diamond, the Bally Sports operator that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the middle of March.
Clarity for four of those teams - all but the Reds - might not be determined until the final day of May, at the earliest, at which point a bankruptcy judge will hear Diamond's claims that those teams should be paid a lesser fee to account for the deterioration of the traditional cable model.