The baseball season opened with a glorious slate of Opening Day games on Thursday, and the MLB offered fans premier matchups that added a further level of intrigue to sweeten the return of baseball.
The very best of the best was saved for the national stage, as ESPN featured a compelling doubleheader of interleague games. In the afternoon, the AL East champion New York Yankees took on the NL Central champion Milwaukee Brewers, while the World Series champions, the Los Angeles Dodgers, looked to build on their international wins against the Chicago Cubs in a primetime matchup with the upstart Detroit Tigers. Between the Yankees’ power surge in a 4-2 victory and the return of NL MVP Shohei Ohtani, both matchups delivered on the network known as the Worldwide Leader in Sports.
Yet MLB’s days of having games featured on ESPN are numbered. The network opted out of its contract with Major League Baseball in February but will broadcast games until the end of the 2025 season. The move allows ESPN to pivot out of a seven-year deal that was set to expire in 2028, while the MLB expressed its intent to seek a new media rights partner for the 2026 season. According to ESPN’s website, ESPN broadcasts 30 regular games per year along with postseason games under their contract and has broadcast MLB games since 1990. FOX and Turner Sports also partner with the league for national broadcasts.
ESPN’s opt-out is bad news for Major League Baseball, mitigating the sport’s significant growth and requiring creativity in the new-age sports media landscape.
The ESPN side of the decision makes sense, and it’s difficult to fault a business (Disney/ESPN) for acting like a business and optimizing its resources. The NFL, NBA and college football move the needle the most of any of the leagues, and ESPN has shelled out the big bucks for media rights for both regular season and postseason broadcasts of the three sports. ESPN has already taken baby steps toward severing its ties with MLB, from limiting its regular-season broadcast total to 30 games to gravitating toward other sports on its premier debate and highlight shows, and the reported $550 million price tag annually is a considerable sum, even for ESPN. MLB can point to its history at ESPN and in the sports landscape and its progress in key demographics, but the sport is evidently not a high priority for the Worldwide Leader in Sports and not worth the cost for broadcast rights in their eyes.
The league’s reaction has been telling, and it’s clear MLB is bearing the brunt of the negative fallout of this decision. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred showed uncharacteristic frustration and transparency when discussing the development on Mad Dog Radio on SiriusXM. Speaking with sports media personality Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, Manfred said the league was frustrated with ESPN’s lack of promotion of the sport even before the opt-out.
“There was a level of dissatisfaction on our part that started with the end of [the] Baseball Tonight [show],” Manfred said. “I think if you watch ESPN — and I do — [and] where we appear on SportsCenter in the morning, there were issues.”
Manfred added that the MLB had been tracking leaks indicating that ESPN intended to opt-out of the contract, but it didn’t make the final outcome any less disappointing.
“Having said that, did we want to be partners with them? Yes,” Manfred said. “But taking less money… and I’ll say this publicly, because I said it to them. They stepped up for the NBA, stepped up for football, stepped up for this one, and to come back to us and say, you know, we want to cut you…”
The commissioner later added that ESPN’s decision ran counter to baseball’s promising gains in key demographics, citing a rise in the 18-34 age range and Hispanic viewing demographics and “a great job in terms of gender breakdown.” Outside of television ratings, MLB games have seen a rise in in-person popularity as well — the league’s average attendance of 29,373 was its highest since 2017. Baseball’s most unorthodox rules development, the pitch clock, has correlated with the average game duration dropping to two hours and 38 minutes in 2024, the fastest since the 1981 season and over a half-hour faster than the 3:10 game duration average in 2019.
The MLB product may be improving and gaining traction, but withdrawing a cornerstone of MLB coverage — one that provides legitimacy and a reliable national audience — removes one of the sport’s greatest allies and difference makers. 30 games may seem like a miniscule amount relative to MLB teams’ 162-game schedule, but ESPN’s presentation of Sunday Night Baseball, where the network featured the games, is a compelling way to market Major League Baseball. The format distills the overwhelming volume of MLB games into a featured event between two nationally relevant teams, which allows casual fans to tune in and get their weekly baseball fix and MLB diehards to watch out-of-market teams in a marquee matchup. When ESPN produced its Baseball Tonight show, Sunday Night Baseball became even more of a big-time event with a built-in show and eye-catching ads to hype up its matchup.
ESPN is not the only network or entity that has been airing national games — Apple TV, FOX and Turner Sports have their own variants of Sunday Night Baseball and differ in audiences they can reach and their accessibility (streaming services vs. television, etc). Still, their baseball showcases fall short of the SNB standard and do not carry the prestige of the ESPN brand. MLB’s intention to replace ESPN with another rights holder is an obvious priority due to the loss of revenue from the original contract, but the league office has a tough task in finding another brand with the visibility and cachet to rival what ESPN brought to the table. Outside-the-box thinking in combining television and streaming entities is now a necessity for MLB — the security of ESPN as a no-brainer partner is gone.
Baseball’s engagement at the local level is one of the real strengths of the MLB, as illustrated by October postseasons that galvanize cities and fan bases year-after-year. The ESPN opt-out won’t affect baseball’s local growth, which is driven more by regional networks and clubs’ marketing efforts than sports media megabrands.
Growth at the national level, however, will inevitably take a hit. ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball coverage not only elevated a weekly MLB game to premier event status and supplemented it with regular programming specific to the sport. The partnership also served to familiarize fans across the nation with the sports’ best players and established their prominence in the sports landscape with discussion throughout the week and exposure on Sundays. The MLB’s attempts to market its best players has been a long-standing struggle, and removing arguably its greatest ally in accomplishing this objective is a disheartening turn for the league. Without ESPN, MLB will need to adapt and find a way to stay relevant and compelling beyond just specific markets.
ESPN’s opt-out is no doubt a gut punch to MLB decision-makers — Manfred himself acknowledged the feelings of disrespect during the saga and turmoil. ESPN determined that MLB’s best games weren’t valuable enough inventory to factor into their long-term strategy, or even to continue their contract through its full length. The major leagues didn’t cut it for the Worldwide Leader in Sports, and that is a difficult message to absorb for a league as storied and popular as the MLB.
But the ego blow isn’t the most impactful aspect of the end of this partnership, but rather the tangible obstacles the MLB must overcome to continue its demographic gains and strides toward increased relevance at a national level — all without the assistance of the sports media empire that has been by its side since 1990.
Manfred credited ESPN for their efforts in producing a great final season of baseball coverage in 2025 and left the door open for a potential reunion. It’s not difficult to see why.
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