What ESPN breakup means for MLB’s TV future

Fri, 7 Mar 2025, 1:20 pm·9-min read

After three decades of partnership, Major League Baseball and ESPN split last month. As media breakups go, it was an ugly one.

ESPN told the league it was opting out of its rights deal, ending its long-running “Sunday Night Baseball” broadcast. Hours later, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred sent a letter to owners that accused ESPN of failing to promote baseball and knocked its “shrinking” platform. Baseball, Manfred proclaimed, was back on the market.

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The memo, unsurprisingly, promptly went public, first via the Athletic, surprising the industry with its tone if not its mechanics. “Rob was aggressive,” said one media company executive, noting that breakups such as these usually are a bit more gentlemanly. Sports Business Journal published a cartoon with Manfred taking a flamethrower to the ESPN logo. “We look forward to our final year of MLB on ESPN,” read the caption.

What the acrimonious split ultimately means for baseball on ESPN is unknown. There are plenty who believe the two still make good dance partners, at least in the long term.

But it still underscores baseball’s uncomfortable reality: While the sport is experiencing record revenue and showing signs of resilient fandom, the deals MLB has signed with its media partners are dwarfed by those signed recently by the NFL, college football and the NBA, despite baseball and basketball having a number of comparable audience metrics. Meanwhile, regional sports networks - a lifeblood of revenue and ratings - are crumbling. A labor dispute looms.

Manfred and others around the sport insist they’re bullish. In the short term, MLB will look to sell its ESPN package to new partners: Sunday night games, the Home Run Derby and the first round of the playoffs. Then, in 2028, Manfred will take the league’s broadcast rights to market - both the national games and, he hopes, teams’ local rights, or at least as many as possible. If Manfred can pull it off, that deal would be the first of its kind and have the potential to be transformational - and incredibly lucrative - for the sport.

Manfred, in an interview, said: “It’s one thing to realize you’re taking a risk, and I realize there’s risk here. But we are betting on our content. We are betting on ourselves and think we’re coming out the other side.”

Scott Boras, baseball’s premier player agent, agreed - and pointed specifically to the NBA’s recent media deal, worth $7 billion annually, as evidence of baseball’s enduring value.

“The NBA built a platform that illustrated two things,” Boras said. “One is the rights for baseball were grossly undervalued in the past. And going forward, what the NBA got is the basement. The platforms know that baseball offers double the content and higher ratings, which requires a higher valuation.”

But the NBA and MLB, for their many similarities, are going to market at different times and are consumed differently. Baseball is a local powerhouse - in St. Louis, Cardinals fans watch religiously - while an NBA game pulls more viewers around the country. That, some industry observers say, has made baseball more fragile.

“There’s a lot to worry about because the [regional sports network] model is much more integral to baseball than other sports,” said Brandon Ross, a co-founder of LightShed Partners, a media and technology investment firm. “I’m more bullish on 2028 than I am the next three years for MLB.”

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Warning signs

At a meeting in January at MLB’s offices in Manhattan, ESPN executives gave the league a presentation about the previous season. A lot of the numbers looked good. Sunday Night Baseball was up 6 percent in an Olympic year, which ESPN said was “incredible.” Hispanic viewership was up, reaching nearly 10 percent of the sport’s audience, which was valuable to advertisers. Younger fans were tuning in, too: Sunday Night Baseball was up 12 percent with 18- to 34-year-olds. (ESPN research also noted at the meeting that Opening Day and MLB viewership on ESPN Plus were down.)

But there were warning signs, according to people familiar with the internal figures, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them publicly: ESPN was paying around $550 million for a package that was generating around $150 million in ad revenue.

And despite the audience gains, revenue generated declined last season, in part, according to those people, because MLB sold packages of games to smaller streamers Apple and Roku. Those platforms paid far less than ESPN to stream MLB games, meaning they could charge less for advertising to recoup their costs. That in turn drove down the price for advertising, the people said. (An ESPN spokesman declined to comment.)

The returns on baseball just didn’t make sense, ESPN and chairman Jimmy Pitaro decided - especially without the best playoff games, which drive much of the value of ESPN’s NBA package. (Fox and TBS air the league championship series and the World Series.) So ESPN took advantage of an opt-out in the contract.

It was the second time the network had asked the league to scale down its package in both dollars and content. Manfred acquiesced the first time. This time, he balked. At ESPN, executives also noted that a day after Manfred knocked its “shrinking” platform, the 4 Nations Face-Off title game drew 10 million viewers, making it ESPN’s most-watched hockey game ever.

One key focus for Manfred now is finding national broadcast TV partners. NBC and its streaming service, Peacock, would be an obvious replacement because it already has Sunday night NFL games and soon will air Sunday night NBA games. MLB has had conversations with executives there. (Puck reported MLB has talked to Amazon’s Prime Video - Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon, which owns Prime Video - and Netflix as well). MLB also could break up the ESPN package and sell the playoffs, Sunday night and the Home Run Derby to different partners and inch closer to what ESPN was paying.

Whatever the package look like, Ross, of LightShed Partners, said MLB should not focus on collecting the biggest check during what could be bridge deals to 2028, when it plans to go in search of a new, more lucrative national rights deal.

“Because it’s only three years, I try to utilize this window to maximize reach and promotion and then go back to the negotiating table as ratings go up,” he said.

Manfred acknowledged that baseball has been perhaps too reliant on cable, and that it valued dollars over reach in its deals that have put key playoff series on TBS and Fox Sports 1 instead of broadcast networks.

“The best available national platforms are broadcast,” Manfred said. “If you can find a broadcast partner or partners and marry it with a robust digital product, preferably run with a big streamer where fans can go in and buy what they want ... that’s a way better model for our business.”

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‘Massive consumption’

There may be no greater frustration around baseball than the perception of MLB vs. the NBA.

The NFL is king, accounting for the vast majority of the highest rated live television events each year. College football seems to be comfortably establishing itself as the country’s second most watched sport. But when the NBA landed its media deal last year, it was both aspirational and a measuring stick for baseball.

In a given week during the current NBA season, an average of 2.5 million people between ages 25 and 54 have tuned in to watch a game across all local and national telecasts, according to Playfly Sports, which sells ads for all regional sports networks in the United States. The number for MLB last season was nearly identical.

“Baseball is a massive consumption vehicle for four months out of the six-month season,” said Craig Sloan, Playfly’s CEO. “From June on, they just lack competition until college football and the NFL launch. [Manfred] has a share of hearts and minds from sports fans by himself for a good portion of a calendar year and deserves to get paid accordingly.”

Average viewership for the World Series over the past three years, helped by the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers last season, was 12 million, compared with 11.7 for the NBA Finals, according to Nielsen. Last year’s World Series was up more than 100 percent among viewers 18-34. Baseball’s All-Star Game and Home Run Derby out-rate the NBA’s All-Star Game and dunk contest, too.

“The NBA absolutely should be a comp,” said Daniel Cohen, who leads the media rights division at sports media company Octagon and has consulted for MLB. “[The ESPN breakup] is way overblown.”

But baseball is also a much more local product. Eighty percent of MLB viewing happens through local broadcasts, compared to 40 percent for the NBA, according to Playfly. Nielsen data also shows 2024 MLB national telecasts averaging around 1 million viewers, while national NBA telecasts in 2023-24 were 1.5 million and attracted a younger audience. (Those figures exclude the league-owned networks, and there are local simulcasts and blackouts that make it hard for a perfect apples-to-apples comparison.)

The data is reflected in the way the two sports are talked about in the media. Baseball, for instance, barely registers on a show such as “First Take,” which still is a critical barometer for what moves the needle in sports culture.

“The idea they will get some NBA-style miracle deal? I don’t see it,” said Bill Gorman, a former AOL executive who ran the website TV By the Numbers for years. “Fox and Turner are not going to be richer in three years, so where does a lot more money come from?”

Still, there is a lot of local viewership. In Philadelphia, the Phillies have averaged more than three times the viewers for regular season games than the 76ers over last baseball season and this NBA season. And in the most recent complete seasons, MLB registered 234 million viewers locally vs. the NBA’s 79 million, thanks to the massive volume of the baseball season.

All of those regular season games were once invaluable to a regional sports network that had hours of airtime to fill, but streaming services such as Prime Video and Netflix have declared more of an interest in singular, must-see events. Even a Sunday night baseball game is the third or fourth game of a series between the same two teams. Alternatively, if Prime Video and Netflix want to embrace advertising, more live sports is a good way to do it.

There is also ESPN. The network is launching a fully direct to consumer offering later this year and was the first to express interest to Manfred in being involved in distributing the local games that he wants to collect and sell. How many teams Manfred can collect remains an open question, with the most marquee teams - the Dodgers, Yankees, New York Mets, Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox - still benefiting from the local RSN model. But whatever he’s selling, Cohen thinks ESPN will be a buyer.

“This is a negotiation,” Cohen said. “It’s not the end of a relationship.”