At this rate, the New York Mets are just trying to stay dry in 2021. Sportico reported SNY lost between $400,000-$500,000 this season due to rainouts and the postponement of the Mets season-opening series due to COVID-19.
The Mets have been one of the unluckiest teams in the MLB when it comes to scheduling. They have had 11 games disrupted this season, leaving SNY to foot the bill on production costs that can’t be pushed back like a baseball game when there is a rainout.
The team still has seven games to makeup, thanks to an unusually high rain total to start the season. From Opening Day to Memorial Day, Sportico reported that the New York area had more than 7 inches of precipitation. That marks a 24% increase from the same time frame last year.
Crews that sign up for the game expect it to get paid, so they are compensated regardless, and ads don’t hold as much weight if the time a business buys keeps getting pushed down the line. All in all, the Mets have played 60 games so far this year, well off the MLB average of 67.
They have been unlucky no matter how you slice it, especially when comparing to the hometown rival New York Yankees. The Pinstripes have had just one game get postponed due to rain, and it was made up the next day. Even then, they are well below the MLB average of 2.9 postponements per team.
There is a lot of money resting on these games for SNY, who relies on live sports as the lifeblood of their channel. Sportico reported their monthly carriage fee could reach $4 per subscriber by next year. SNY is carried by 8 million homes in the metro New York market, with an additional 4 million subscribers scatter throughout the country. The network pays about $52 million per year to broadcast Mets games.