Marquee Sports Network has made some staff cuts

When the Cubs announced that they were starting their own regional sports network, to take over broadcasts beginning after 2019, the idea was to bring “wheelbarrows of cash” (as Cubs President of Business Operations Crane Kenney once put it) to the baseball ops team and let them spend it on top players.

Well. Marquee Sports Network had the misfortune to debut right when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down baseball for months, and then they had to broadcast games from empty ballparks in a 60-game season. The Cubs then went through the “rebuild that’s not a rebuild” after 2021, and the channel never brought in the sort of money that the Cubs hoped it would.

Now, per this article by Jeff Agrest in the Sun-Times, Marquee is cutting back:

Diane Penny is out as GM after joining the network in April 2024. Hired to accelerate Marquee’s digital transformation, she failed to drive revenue with her efforts, leading to significant cuts to the digital content team. Content director Tony Andracki and reporter Andy Martinez were among them.

“In the interim, we will use Cubs and Sinclair resources to fill [Penny’s] role as we assess the future leadership needs of the network,” Crane Kenney, the Cubs’ president of business operations, told the Sun-Times.

In place of Penny, a Villa Park native, Cubs chief commercial officer Colin Faulkner will oversee game coverage and production, all but erasing the line between the team and the network and putting the operation in the hands of a TV neophyte.

Faulkner also will oversee marketing and talent. Marquee hasn’t decided what will become of its website.

Other cuts are being made, including letting go director of content Tony Andracki and reporter Andy Martinez.

Several other management changes are being made to Marquee, but for most of you, the content you watch the channel for — live Cubs games — will remain the same:

Although all RSNs are navigating the headwinds of a changing sports-media landscape, Marquee has significantly reduced the diverse programming it heralded at launch, scaling down to focus on game coverage.

“We’re continuing to prioritize live game broadcasts as the primary content on the network,” Kenney said.

And that’s the literal bottom line, I think. For most Cubs fans, live games are the content they want. Marquee tried to expand into other areas and other sports and wound up coming up empty with a lot of it. The pandemic and the RSN bubble are the reasons for most of it, I think. Agrest’s article wraps with this bit of foreboding:

Marquee’s next issue — beyond a potential work stoppage after next baseball season — could be MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s desire to centralize teams’ media rights. But the Cubs and Sinclair have a long-term agreement that figures to make such an arrangement difficult.

With all the new national TV agreements that were announced a couple of weeks ago, all of MLB’s national rights, including the deals with Fox and TBS, end after the 2028 season. What Manfred wants to do is to try to package all 30 teams’ local rights — and the league already controls all rights for six teams — with the national rights and sell it all as one big package. It’s not just the Cubs agreement that might make that difficult — try convincing the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets or Red Sox, all of whom have partial or full ownership of their RSNs, to give up all their local rights to MLB.

For the most part, for you the Cubs game viewer, these moves will largely be transparent. You’ll still see the live game coverage you want. It’s not clear whether pre- and post-game coverage will change, though I’m reasonably certain there will be some.

As always, we await developments.