The business of major league baseball broadcasting continues to alter its face, led by the restructuring of the very concept of how games reach the airways. Surprise of surprises, the Red Sox are proving to be a leader in this alteration.

Sox fans long ago became accustomed to seeing some televised games on over-the-air stations (those that could be picked up without cable) and some on NESN. NESN began with the Red Sox as part owners, but eventually the club came to own NESN entirely. The sale of the Red Sox this year for $670 million included about half of that amount going to the purchase of equity the Sox had in NESN.

The right to broadcast local MLB games has long resulted from competitive bidding by stations in a team’s market. The local stations sold the advertising and their profits resulted, in the simplest terms, in the difference between the rights fees and the advertising dollars.

As teams searched for new revenue sources, they ran the numbers on keeping the rights and the advertising dollars for themselves, while buying time to air games on cable and over-the-air stations. They found that created more revenue for the team.

That concept grew to what the Sox did in buying a part of NESN. Now the club not only shared in the revenue from Sox advertising, but also in revenue generated by other events carried on NESN. It was a small step to then say, “Hey, why not own the broadcast outlet entirely?” That’s what the Sox did with NESN.

The Yankees have done that this year with the YES network that carries all the Yankees games and places them on cable systems in the New York area. They have run into a problem with Cablevision in New York, a major cable operation that refuses to carry the games on its system. That is a fistfight between the Yankees and Cablevision owners too detailed to explain here.

The Orioles are producing 120 of their games this year with their own broadcasting department and then buying the airtime from over-the-air stations for broadcast. John Clairborne is the Orioles head of broadcasting, having spent 16 years as head of NESN. Baltimore hopes to create its own regional network, like the Sox and the Yankees, in 2006 when its current cable contract expires.

Like NESN, Baltimore wants to carry college sports on its cable operation and would buy some programming from the likes of ESPN. That is another development with some irony. ESPN now finds it can generate income-producing shows to be carried on competing cable networks.

As a broadcaster, this shift to teams owning and producing their own games is a slippery slope. The entire broadcast then becomes a “sell the team” event and any idea of journalism or broadcast integrity is put at risk.

When stations that bought the rights and hired their own announcers carried the games, there was some protection for broadcasters who sought to be honest with the fans about how the club was playing and being run. That protection is gone when the teams are the broadcast outlets and control everything related to the airing of the games.

Two decades ago the idea of baseball teams removing games from over-the-air channels and placing them on a pay-per-view basis was abhorrent. Today we are a cable/satellite-driven audience. We pay the monthly TV bill along with the water and electric bill and don’t seem to think much of it.

That mentality has allowed baseball teams to go forward with a longtime dream of controlling their own broadcasts and reaping all the revenue. Once that dream was called pay-per-view, now it is called cable.

Will MLB fans pay a separate fee, hidden as an increase in the cable bill, to watch the old home team? Probably. If not, there is that beautiful sound of baseball on the radio to fill the summer nights.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and NBC sportscaster.