The nightmare for Minnesota Twins fans is over. We’re not talking about the potential sale of the team, although that could be finished as soon as Opening Day. We’re talking about being able to watch their games on TV.
Thankfully, the Twins announced their pricing plans for the new streaming service on Friday.
Twins.TV will launch at the start of this season and be available for $19.99 per month or $99.99 for the entire season. Season ticket holders will also be able to acquire the service with a 50 percent discount and the team will air five Spring Training games as a free preview to allow fans to test the service out.
While the announcement is good news, the Twins also announced that there will be no blackouts in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Iowa or Minnesota as part of the new distributing plan, which is music to everyone’s ears.
The Twins' television nightmare is over with MLB’s distribution plan
Twins fans have gone through a lot to get to this point, dating back to the beginning of the decade. Diamond Sports Group purchased the regional FOX Sports channels from Sinclair Broadcasting back in 2020 and began removing the channel, rebranded to Bally’s Sports North, from popular streaming outlets including YouTube TV.
Fans still had access to Twins games through traditional cable providers and FuboTV but things got worse this summer when Diamond Sports Group got into a dispute with Comcast. The dispute took Twins games off the air on the largest cable provider in the Twin Cities for nearly three months and was a key source of fan angst alongside the team’s $30 million payroll slash last winter.
The Twins announced that MLB would be producing their games in October but Friday’s announcement was still a relief. The Cincinnati Reds and Milwaukee Brewers made similar announcements back in October but decided to go back to Main Street Sports Group when they emerged from bankruptcy earlier this month. A similar decision would have put the blackouts back in play and would have likely enraged a fan base that already has enough to deal with.
What happens next with the Twins’ TV deal?
For now, the Twins have already announced their broadcast teams for the upcoming season and it should also be noted that streaming won’t be the only way for fans to watch games. The Twins will have a dedicated channel to showing games during the season and details for those channels and providers will be provided at a later date.
There’s also a small drawback in the plan that Twins games aren’t available with a standard MLB.TV subscription. While it wasn’t described in detail during Friday’s media luncheon, the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres had a similar distribution plan last season, giving fans an option to purchase their games along with the rest of the MLB.TV package for $199.99.
Still, there will be more ways to find the Twins on TV than there have been in the past, making Friday’s announcement a victory for fans who were blacked out last season.