Into what category of copyrightable material does a baseball game fall? What about film, video, and audio transcriptions?
Under U.S. copyright law, musical phonorecords do not have performance rights associated with them; if you wish to charge admission for people to listen to your copy of Bob Smith and his orchestra playing a piece of music written by Fred Jones, you would have to pay royalties to Fred Jones, but not to Bob Smith. Since a baseball game isn't a musical performance, however, I don't know what the rules would be except to note that, in general, bars are allowed to show games on TV without payment to (or permission from) Major League Baseball provided they don't charge admission and certain other conditions are met.
On a related note, there is some to-do in Chicago between the Cubs and neighboring bars that sell seats on their rooftops. The Cubs are claiming that these bar owners are violating their inherent copyright in their games. The only way the Cubs would have a point would be if the bar was charging admission to get into an area in which the game was shown on TV or a radiocast was played. My guess is that the bars probably do that currently, but could get around that by selling people cheap radios with which to listen to the game (with the people--not the bar--owning all the radios).