The St. Louis Cardinals and Fox Sports Midwest announced a new, long-term television rights agreement on Thursday morning which will see the two parties continue to work together from 2018 through the 2032 season.
“We’re really excited, we worked on it a long time,” said Bill DeWitt Jr. “I think this increase rights fee and equity component will help enable to be competitive on the field and do at Busch Stadium the kinds of things that we’re used to doing.”
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Terms were not announced, but according to the Post-Dispatch, the deal is worth upwards of $1 billion.
“The payroll clearly, we forecast it, will be going up,” confirmed DeWitt. “We knew this was coming and part of increased revenue that Major League Baseball has coming in as well. I think you can see with some of things that have gone on, particularly at the trade deadline, there’s more money in the game and to be competitive we need to keep up with it.”
But staying competitive does not mean the Cardinals will be abandoning their past habits and begin throwing long-term deals with crazy money around.
“We’re always pretty disciplined to make sure that we don’t get strung out with a long, bad contract, and those types of those things,” said DeWitt. “I think it’s served us well over the years–been opportunistic. You all know we just made a deal where we took on money and we were in position to do that. I think some teams maybe aren’t–part of that is not being saddled with contracts that aren’t working out or for one reason or another haven’t worked out. But we’re fully cognizant of the market place and when we need to, we’ll go long.”
Besides impacting the payroll, the deal also allows for the Cardinals to continue to be aggressive on the international talent front and be in a position to capitalize with any changes as the structure of draft may change in the future.
photo credit: Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
