A look back at 2004’s Victory Sports debacle

The recent saga of watching a Minnesota Twins baseball game on television has rivaled Frank Herbert’s Dune. After FOX was forced to diverge itself from the regional sports racket and disappeared from many platforms (YouTube TV, Dish Network, etc.), Bally looked to be a white knight—until parent company Sinclair declared bankruptcy on its Diamond Sports holdings. Whoops.

This offseason, much was made of direct-to-consumer streaming options or banishing blackout restrictions on MLB TV. Yet, the “final answer” (at least for now) was slinking back into bed with Bally for one more year.

While this seems like a modern problem for the streaming age, the airing of Twins baseball has a history of hiccups, none so notable as Victory Sports One—as good a topic as any to kick off my season-long 2004 check-ins.

After two division championships (2002-2003), the Minnesota Twins had finally clawed themselves back to baseball relevance after the bleak late-90s and a near-contraction scare. Yet, residing in a “middle market” in perhaps the sport’s most uninspired stadium, opportunities for cash infusion seemed few and far between. So, Twins owner Carl Pohlad looked to the East Coast for inspiration—specifically, the New York Yankees (eww) and their YES Network.

Instead of operating within the traditional regional sports network setup, the Bombers set up their own operation and sold it directly to cable/satellite providers. No middle man = bigger profits. As such, after 15 seasons partnering with Midwest Sports Channel and/or Fox Sports North, the Pohlads unveiled Victory Sports One on October 31, 2003. It would prove to be as horrifying as the Halloween holiday it debuted on.

You see, Minnesota could not command (or demand) the market share of Manhattan Island. So, cable/satellite providers immediately balked at the Pohlads’ VS1 asking price—leading to it only being carried by a select few. Technically, providers were more than happen to place VS1 on a higher—and more expensive—tier, but Twins ownership held firm that the channel reside on “basic cable”.

On one hand, live sports were clearly—even in the early 2000s—propping up the entire cable/satellite industry. On the other hand, with the rights to the Timberwolves & Wild still on FOX, VS1 featured exactly two programs besides Twins game broadcasts: ESPNews simulcasts and Kent Hrbek’s fishing show—not exactly a deep bench.

When the 2004 season began, very few Twins fans residing in MN were able to watch their boys of summer without sitting in a blue Metrodome seat. I was one of them—a senior in high school going out of my mind at not being able to watch the Twins. I distinctly recall my music instructor—a fellow baseball fanatic—needling me that his TV carriage got VS1.

The Pohlads held out for a month before the pressure to get the Twins back on the air reached a fever pitch. When it became clear that cable/satellite providers weren’t going to budge, VS1 was scuttled on May 8, 2004 and a new deal (which would actually prove quite lucrative for the next two decades) with FOX Sports was immediately agreed upon. My beloved channel 29 was back in business!

By the nature of the “bridge year” deal with BSN for 2024, it certainly seems as if massive changes are forthcoming for baseball’s TV distribution. But it would take quite an ordeal to match that of Victory Sports One—a debacle that will forever live in Twins lore beside Brunansky-for-Herr, Ron Davis, Tsuyoshi Nishioka, and “bilateral leg weakness”.

“All of this has happened before and will happen again” (J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan)