Earlier in the year, ESPN and Major League Baseball agreed to a mutual opt-out of their seven-year media rights deal, which reportedly averaged $550 million per season. The network has carried MLB games since 1990 and currently carries Sunday Night Baseball contests, the Home Run Derby and matchups in the Wild Card Round of the postseason. MLB commissioner Robert D. Manfred Jr. stated in a memo acquired by The Athletic that the league has “not been pleased with the minimal coverage” on ESPN platforms beyond live game coverage and referred to the network as a “shrinking platform.”
Manfred recently appeared in studio for Mad Dog Unleashed on SiriusXM Mad Dog Sports Radio where he elaborated on the situation. Being interviewed by host Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo, he explained that there were leaks about the opt out over the last year and that the eventual phone call was unfortunate. Manfred cited the end of Baseball Tonight as the beginning of dissatisfaction with ESPN, which could have been referencing when the show stopped airing daily in 2017, although he did not confirm as such on the air. Russo added that First Take only did one segment on Opening Day on the Wednesday edition of the show, on which he appeared in studio.
“I’ll say this publicly because I said it to them,” Manfred explained. “They stepped up for the NBA, they stepped up for football, stepped up for this one, and to come back to us and say, ‘We want to cut you.’”
Manfred confirmed that the league felt hurt and as if it was being treated disrespectfully by ESPN following a year in which the sport attained viewership gains. ESPN recently attained its most-watched Sunday Night Baseball regular-season slate of games in five years, averaging 1.5 million viewers and registering double-digit growth in key demographics. The network also garnered the most-viewed MLB Wild Card Series in history, averaging 2.82 million viewers on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2.
“It was an unfortunate thing,” Manfred said. “They were a great, great partner. The one thing I will give them credit for – I do think they’ve at least said, ‘We’re going to do a great job this year,’ and I think a lot of their talent has been out there saying, ‘We want to do a great job,’ and who knows. Life’s long – something good may happen.”
There have been reports of FOX Sports, NBC Sports, YouTube and Netflix looking at different aspects of the media rights owned by ESPN. This is expected to be a temporary solution though as the league aims to alter its national and local media rights strategy in 2028 amid the expiration of deals with FOX Sports and Warner Bros. Discovery. Under this new arrangement, the league would seek to acquire linear and digital rights for all 30 teams to be available concurrent with national renewals.
“I think our goal in the next round of media negotiations in ‘28 would be to get to a more fan-friendly breakdown,” Manfred said. “We’d like to have a bigger national presence – more games that are on national broadcast and the reach the goes along with it – and on the digital side, we’d like to have a kind of friction free access for fans, get rid of the blackouts, know that if you go to the digital side of the house, you’re either going to be able to get the game there or it’s going to tell you it’s on FOX today.”
Manfred admitted that spreading national games across seven media services is a lot and added that the interest since the opt-out has been very good. While he conveyed that money does matter, he also explained that the league is paying “special attention to reach” amid the decline of the cable television bundle. Several teams around the league have introduced direct-to-consumer options in recent years, including those in major marketplaces, that allows fans to subscribe to view games without a traditional cable television subscription.
“As the RSNs lost distribution and the subscribers dropped, there’s a lot of markets where access to games is an issue,” Manfred said. “We’ve made a real effort on direct to consumer. I think we’re up to 23 teams that now have a direct-to-consumer offering on the digital side, and that reach issue is going to be really at the front of our minds.”
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