The Seattle Mariners open the Major League Baseball season on Monday, but don’t bother looking for the game on local cable television.

BendBroadband customers likely will not see the game after that, either, or most games Seattle plays this season.

BendBroadband has not carried Root Sports, which broadcasts nearly all of the Mariners’ 162 games as well as Major League Soccer’s Portland Timbers, since the new year began after the cable provider and the sports cable network failed to reach a new agreement in December.

Though Root Sports is still carried by satellite providers Dish Network and DirecTV, the impasse between Root Sports and BendBroadband has left many area baseball fans without a way to watch Mariners games. And with no negotiations currently taking place, a solution does not appear imminent.

BendBroadband says it comes down to cost. When Root Sports lost some popular programming — such as many Pac-12 Conference sports events to the new Pac-12 Network — its value dropped locally, says John Farwell, BendBroadband vice president of business operations. Many University of Oregon and Oregon State football and basketball games are now broadcast on the Pac-12 Network.

Root Sports did offer to drop its rates, but not enough to compensate for the loss of programming, Farwell contends.

“It would have remained BendBroadband’s third-most-expensive channel, with only 1 percent of viewers tuning in,” Farwell says.

Farwell adds that Root Sports demanded to be in BendBroadband’s more basic “Essentials” package rather than in a premium tier.

“Given the high cost and low viewership, the channel simply didn’t belong in our most popular package,” Farwell says. “Simply put, this requirement would have forced the vast majority of our customers to pay for an expensive channel they don’t watch.”

That underplays the importance of the Pacific Northwest’s only Major League Baseball team and the Timbers, says Steve Schwartz, Root Sports’ vice president of affiliate relations.

Schwartz says that Root Sports is not looking for a better deal than it had with BendBroadband. All it wants is to get the same treatment on BendBroadband’s cable packages that it has always received.

“I’m really confused as to why they made the decision that they did to stop carrying these games for their customers,” says Schwartz. “They’ve always had those games.

“We think we’ve made a really compelling offer,” Schwartz adds.

Tough economics

Schwartz says such battles between content distributors, such as cable companies, and networks have become increasingly common as the fees networks charge cable and satellite companies have risen.

The stakes have become even higher as the value of sports programming — most of which is watched live by passionate fans — has gone up since the advent of digital video recorders that allow viewers to skip commercials, Schwartz adds.

That has meant that the cost networks pay to carry certain teams has gone up, too.

“The economy is really tough right now,” Schwartz says. “The distributors don’t feel like they can raise their rates to keep up with the increased costs that they are having to take on.”

With no agreement between Root Sports and BendBroadband, the only way a Central Oregon cable subscriber can watch the Mariners at home is during a nationally televised game on stations such as ESPN, TBS or Fox. (MLB.TV’s live streaming of Mariners games is blacked out in this market.)

That has left at least some Central Oregon residents frustrated.

“We hate disappointing any of our customers but made this hard decision to benefit the majority of them,” Farwell says. “We have heard from the small but dedicated fan base, roughly 300 subscribers, which correlates with our audience measurement of 1 to 2 percent.”

Here at home

Bend’s Paul Sample is one of those dedicated fans. The 49-year-old real estate appraiser is a Seattle-area native who tends to watch at least a portion of almost every Mariners game.

Sample credits BendBroadband with recently adding the Pac-12 Network channels, Comcast SportsNet — which broadcasts most Portland Trail Blazers basketball games — and other sports networks such as the MLB Network. But he wonders why BendBroadband carries channels such as the Big 10 Network and why his cable bill has risen this year despite dropping Root Sports.

“It’s just unfortunate,” Sample says. “But we’ll figure something else to watch, I guess.”

Sample is not going to switch to satellite, he says.

Neither is Barney Howard, a 92-year-old Bend retiree. But Howard would make the switch if his retirement home would allow it, he says.

“I think (BendBroadband’s) figures are wrong,” Howard says. “I was watching the emails going back to BendBroadband (to complain), and there are a lot of people with a lot of emails going back. But (BendBroadband) says there are not enough people watching to pay their way.”

The good news is that both sides still say an agreement could be reached.

“We would love to be able to get Root Sports back on the air, with terms that are a win-win for Central Oregon customers and Root Sports,” Farwell says.

How that could happen is an open question.

But with no negotiations at the moment, it appears unlikely that Mariners baseball will be on many Central Oregon TVs on opening day.

“At the end of the day, what we’re really looking for is to provide the fans of the local teams here ~ the games that they’ve always received,” Schwartz says. “And we think those fans deserve that.”