Major League Baseball's failure to land anything close to the kind of deal it had hoped to realize for future broadcast rights, analysts were predicting Wednesday that the days of huge fee increases for professional sports may be over. "We're looking at a market that is now at least neutral," Neal Pilson, president of Pilson Communications, a sports television consulting company, told Bloomberg News Wednesday.

Pilson, a former president of CBS Sports, predicted that the National Basketball Assn. will also be unable to negotiate another huge fee increase. "I don't see how the NBA can get a big increase. They'll get a small one," he said. But Fox Sports chief Ed Goren reacted cautiously. "I think you need to see more than one contract before we can call this a trend," he told the wire service.

Source: Studio Briefing