Whether watching Gunnar Henderson smack a home run or Grayson Rodriguez strike out the side on TV, most fans aren’t really wondering how the broadcast sausage gets made.

Over the past 14 years, the Orioles and Nationals — squabbling like siblings tied together for a three-legged race — probably exposed more about the process than most of the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network viewers wanted or needed.

At the end of the day, viewers shouldn’t need to worry about revenue splits or parity clauses. Fans just want to watch ball.

While the local baseball teams have fought, the product has suffered. It’s never more clear than now in spring training, where the Orioles and Nats have a paltry amount of TV offerings compared to other big league clubs, with broadcasters working remotely rather than watching the games live.

Monday morning’s announcement that the Orioles and Nats have buried the hatchet and no longer have to tangle in court is a starting point for something better. Aside from the lawyers, who’d I’d imagine have made a fortune in fees, the rest of us should be relieved that an ugly chapter has passed and MASN can focus on what now matters the most, and what it hasn’t really focused on for a while: the viewers.

Fans, including myself speaking as a beleaguered Comcast customer, have been clamoring for years for a direct-to-consumer option. Outside of baseball games, MASN programming is an oddball mix of things that draw no discernible viewership, like professional poker or sumo wrestling — whatever is cheap and available.

As much as you may like Kevin Brown, Jim Palmer and Ben McDonald among the team’s talented broadcasters, the network’s extremely lean budget crops up in the overall polish. “O’s Xtra” used to have two hosts, for example — now it has one who also does sideline reporting.

Is it shocking that John Angelos was chief operating officer and president of MASN as the quality began to dip? I’ll take your answers off-air.

I can’t say definitively that the lawsuit with the Nationals is what ate up so much of MASN’s oxygen or budget, robbing the viewers of the best broadcast and streaming options they could get. But at least now, with the settlement behind them, there’s no excuse for MASN to be concerned about anything else.

There used to be a purpose to the deal that then-owner Peter Angelos negotiated with MLB. A bulldog litigator in his own right, Angelos had the vision to understand that the Nationals represented competition in his own very spacious backyard extending down through the DMV. The fact that his fellow owners turned so quickly on him for standing his ground against the relocating Expos is a kind of testament to the iconoclast he was — and in a way, how he stood up for his city.

When the Nats came to D.C. in 2005, it made sense for Angelos to make sure his own bottom line was protected. Putting up fences — around viewers, around broadcast rights, around revenue percentages — was a viable strategy. I can’t say for sure what the Orioles did with all the money they made off the arrangement, but they definitely made a lot of money when cable subscriptions were king.

Now in a world of cord-cutting, it’s not so clear who exactly the arrangement serves. Regional sports networks across the country are struggling, and MASN has lost millions of subscribers and the accompanying revenue. So, a deal that was one of the biggest coups in sports broadcasting no longer offers Baltimore the monumental leverage it once did, while also preventing the teams from adapting to a streaming future. The Nationals began to act less like a partner and more like a thrashing hostage.

All the fences that the Orioles put up began to actually fence them in, too. In that light, it’s no surprise David Rubenstein and his ownership group found a way to move on within the first year of ownership.

In a larger view, the whole affair was an eyesore for the MLB. The infighting felt a bit like listening to a pair of line cooks bickering in the back of a diner. Meanwhile all the customers are wondering why their breakfast took so long to arrive — and why there are bits of shell in their cold scrambled eggs.

As baseball fans, we just need to get served.

There’s only one more year of the awkward joint venture of MASN, after which it seems like a world of possibilities open up. There has been little update on what a direct-to-consumer product might look like, but it’s at the forefront of the MLB’s plans for expanding viewing options. There’s no reason that the Orioles — who are the more exciting, more competitive club currently — can’t fund a broadcast product that is as compelling as the team itself.

This also brings Baltimore out of the MLB’s doghouse, as it were. While the team and the city need to do a lot to bring the All-Star Game back for the first time since 1993, the cloud hanging over the MASN infighting probably kept baseball from taking the Orioles seriously as a host at all.

I wish I could say with more detail and clarity exactly how the Orioles’ broadcasting future unfolds. I’m not really sure.

The regional broadcasting industry is in a tailspin, and teams are approaching it in remarkably different ways. Whether the Orioles continue to operate their own broadcasts through MASN is probably a legitimate question given the uncertainty.

But the Orioles and Nats both needed a split. The agreement had to end for both franchises to move on in good faith and start adapting for that future. It’s not so much a conclusion as a starting point for whatever comes next.

However you look at it, the future of the Orioles on TV looks a lot different. Given how little the viewers have been served over the past few years by MASN, that’s a good thing.