How to watch St. Louis Cardinals games after Comcast dropped Bally Sports

If you are a St. Louis Cardinals fan and have Comcast as your cable provider, you may have noticed while searching for one of their games last week that Bally Sports Midwest is nowhere to be found on your package. Comcast officially dropped Bally Sports from their packages as Diamond Sports Group continues to flounder in its bankruptcy process.

While the Cardinals' offense has made watching the team frustrating as of late, many fans still want to be able to flip on a game when they so choose. Here's a comprehensive update on the Cardinals' broadcasting situation as well as how to watch games the rest of this season as the future of Cardinals broadcasts remains uncertain.

Why did Comcast drop Bally Sports and locally televised Cardinals games?

If you have not been following the Bally Sports situation the last year, their parent company, Diamond Sports Group, filed for bankruptcy last March, and all of the clubs who had their games broadcast through Bally Sports have been scrambling to figure out what the future of their television revenue will look like.

While the expectation was that the Cardinals games on Bally Sports would continue through the remainder of the 2024 season with no hiccups, negotiations for an extension with Comcast fell through, causing the provider to drop Bally Sports entirely. This will have a major impact on fans who are trying to watch the Cardinals' games in Central Illinois.

How do I watch Cardinals games if I lost coverage through Comcast?

Major League Baseball's blackouts continue to make watching games a nightmare for anyone who does not have cable access (or their provider dropped Bally Sports), but there are a few ways to catch games going forward if you fall into that category.

• fuboTV (which has a free trial)
• DirecTV stream
• Spectrum

What is the plan for Cardinals television and streaming rights beyond 2024?

While there are no official plans for the Cardinals' television and streaming broadcasts beyond the 2024 season at this moment, there are a few options on the table, and all of them appear to be much better than what fans have had to navigate in recent years.

Cardinals' ownership knows the current state of Cardinals' broadcasting rights presents major issues for both fans and the club, so there has been a lot of talk about the Cardinals distributing their own games in 2025 and beyond through a subscription service, allowing fans to access the games directly through the Cardinals, rather than through a third party cable provider or media group.

Whether that's the creation of their own television network (similar to clubs like the Yankees and the Cubs) or a direct-to-consumer streaming option like the Diamondbacks were able to move to this season, the goal from the Cardinals' perspective is to get as many eyeballs as possible on their product and make it as easy as possible for fans to consume.

We'll continue to update the situation as more information comes regarding the Cardinals' broadcasting rights here at Redbird Rants.