The Nats and Os have a pretty massive TV territory, as do the Braves. Tennessee is currently split between the Braves and Reds, and would be a pretty small territory if that's all they got.
The O's didn't really need to have control of the Nats TV rights. Being able to bundle them and sell to a large territory with some kind of split should have worked out favorably to both sides in the RSN/carriage fee model where it didn't really matter if people were watching the games. The O's made a bet that they could grow the carriage fees faster than the average right fees went up, but lost the bet when average rights fees went up faster than expected and carriage fees started a downward trend.
Once the MASN mess and Bally's SN bankruptcies are resolved, it will be curious to see what matters in whatever the new model looks like. I imagine gate receipts and size of actual fan base who watches games becomes more important than local TV market size.
