You may actually want to watch them this year!
The Royals have added some talent and could be quite watchable with young rising players like Bobby Witt Jr., Vinnie Pasquantino, and Cole Ragans. But baseball and its television partners have not exactly made it easy to tune in and watch your boys in blue. Here’s your 2024 guide on how you can watch your Royals.
All 162 Royals games will be broadcast, with 161 games to be carried on Bally Sports Kansas City. One game, the May 10 game against the Angels, will air exclusively on Apple+ for subscribers only. Three other games - May 9 against the Angels, May 20 against the Tigers, and June 27 against the Guardians - will air simultaneously on both Bally Sports Kansas City and FS1.
The entire broadcast crew returns, with Ryan Lefebvre, Jake Eisenberg, and Rex Hudler on the call. Former Royals Mike Sweeney and Jeremy Guthrie will once again fill in on select series. Every game will include the “Price Chopper Royals Live” pre-game show and will be followed by the “Rally House Royals Live” postgame show, both hosted by Joel Goldberg and Jeff Montgomery.
Bally Sports Kansas City is carried by certain local cable and satellite providers that you can find here, including Cox, Spectrum, AT&T U-Verse, Xfinity, DirecTV, and Fubo. Subscribers of the streaming service FuboTV can also access Bally Sports Kansas City for $79.99 per month.
You can also purchase Bally Sports+ as as standalone direct-to-streaming option for $19.99 per month, $105.99 for the entire Royals season, or $189.99 for the entire year.
For those out of the Kansas City Royals territorial market, you can watch games through MLB.TV for $29.99 per month of $149.99 for the entire season, although blackout restrictions apply.
Amazon invested in Diamond Sports, the parent company of Bally Sports Kansas City, with an agreement to purchase the streaming rights of certain teams, including the Royals. But the deal still needs to be signed off by the judge overseeing Diamond’s bankruptcy.
Bally Sports has this to say about the deal on their website:
Once this agreement is approved and goes into effect, Bally Sports+ will be available for purchase through Amazon’s Prime Video Channel platform for an incremental cost. If you currently watch through a pay TV provider, nothing will change....
Details regarding pricing and availability will be announced at a later date.
It is also unclear what, if any, blackout restrictions would apply to games carried on Amazon Prime Video.
While nationally broadcast TV ratings have declined over the last few decades, local TV ratings remain very strong for baseball. Teams sign long-term contracts with regional sports networks like Bally Sports Kansas City that grant exclusivity in their territorial market in exchange for lucrative revenues to the teams. So the blackout restrictions are a way to preserve value for those networks, and give them leverage when they negotiate deals with platforms - that’s when they ask you to “call your cable provider and demand they do not drop Bally Sports Kansas City!”
This became more of a problem once Sinclair Broadcasting, parent company of Diamond Sports, purchased 14 regional sports networks that carried baseball, including Bally Sports Kansas City (then known as Fox Sports Kansas City). Sinclair was known to be a tough negotiator, and soon after the purchase those networks were dropped by platforms like YouTubeTV, SlingTV, and Hulu. Baseball has recognized the blackout policies have become a problem, limiting exposure of their sport to fans, but many teams are locked in to long-term deals. The bankruptcy of Diamond Sports has given baseball an opportunity to potentially buy back some of the rights or work out deals with other providers like Amazon to possibly open games to a broader audience.
You can always listen to the Royals on radio through 610 Sports in Kansas City or one of the many affiliates as part of the Royals Radio network. And of course, we will have game threads with the witty commentary and analysis of our fans.
