I caught the last few innings of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball on Sunday night. Drake Baldwin was the hero that night, blasting an opposite-field, two-run home run in the top of the ninth inning. This pushed the Braves to a 3-1 lead, one that the “No Slider” version of Raisel Iglesias was able to lock down for the win. I don’t typically watch sports studio shows, but I was willing to watch the opening minutes to see the highlights. Instead, ESPN launched into a long-winded discussion about the missing
pieces to a successful Phillies playoff run. Guess how much I watched.
ESPN is allowing the Sunday Night Baseball deal with MLB to expire in 2025, and most observers including myself assumed they were done with Major League Baseball. Broadcasting MLB to a mass audience has been a losing proposition for some time, as CBS learned in the 1990s. But ESPN can’t quit baseball after all. From the Athletic:
Major League Baseball and ESPN have a framework agreement that would give the network the exclusive rights to sell all out-of-market regular-season games digitally and in-market games for five clubs over the next three years, sources briefed on the discussions told The Athletic. ¶ ESPN would continue to broadcast around 30 regular-season games, but not “Sunday Night Baseball.” ESPN would move to a different night during the week. The games on the network would remain exclusive, meaning viewers would only be able to watch these matchups through ESPN. The agreement would begin next season. ¶ ESPN would continue to broadcast around 30 regular-season games, but not “Sunday Night Baseball.” ESPN would move to a different night during the week. The games on the network would remain exclusive, meaning viewers would only be able to watch these matchups through ESPN. The agreement would begin next season.
Yeah, no one really knows what this will look like. Will you need a ESPN+ account to then have access to pay for MLB.tv? Will it still be possible to purchase the Braves season a la carte? Are we going to have Jon Miller or David Cone calling Braves games twice a week or more? There are a lot of questions right now, but a few things will remain the same.
ESPN appeals to the mass audience
Broadcasters want large audiences. That sounds a little too basic, but they want to appeal to the greatest number of people possible. A great way to build a audience is too try to appeal to the largest media markets. Those are ones located in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington D.C. If flyover country like it as well, then it’s great too. But the focus is there. And you can see this in the way that the college football landscape had changed. For example, USC versus traditional West Coast rivals are out (because LA market only) and USC versus Michigan (LA plus Big Ten market) is in.
Outside of large markets, they don’t care
ESPN really only cares about a handful of teams: the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Phillies, Dodgers, Cubs, and when they’re good, the Nationals. Those are teams in markets that they actually are trying to appeal. It’s not only where the people are, it’s where traditional media lives. I’m talking about the few cities where having actual printed city newspapers exist and they employ baseball writers. Yeah, they get ESPN’s attention.
My personal opinion has been that I don’t care. The top teams aren’t voted in baseball’s playoffs, rather they do stuff like win a division or win a lot of games. Their analysts’ opinion matters in college football and basketball, but ultimately means nothing to MLB. I used to think they hated the Braves, but it’s more like indifference to the rest of the teams. They actually forgot that the Chicago White Sox won a World Series in 2005. Which is weird because they like the Chicago Cubs. Well, enough of the unwashed rest of America likes the Cubs, so they do too.
They may leave MLB Network and other content alone
There’s a decent chance that they don’t touch the creation of content very much, and will only act as a conduit to your favorite MLB teams. Look at how they handle content for the National Hockey League and the major European soccer leagues. You can watch practically every hockey game via the newly rebranded ESPN Select and new all-content-inclusive (minus PPV UFC matches) ESPN Unlimited.
These games have the home announcers for hockey games. It’s exactly what you would see on the Fanduel feeds. They have recognized announcers doing soccer matches. Those soccer announcers may have biases, but those aren’t coming from ESPN. They have an dominant-English-media feel to them.
I don’t watch a ton of MLB Network or MLB.tv content, but what I have seen is good. I love the quad-box feature, and they do a great job of bouncing around to all the games. I have high hopes that ESPN will let it be. There’s likely no way the Braves will lose their announcers.
Let’s see how it plays out
ESPN launched their new streaming platform with all of their linear channels recently. The price of $29.99 is really good for what you get if you don’t want the rest of cable’s offerings, although I doubt it stays at that price more than a year. I saw that the amount that ESPN charged cable companies $21 per subscriber, but that was during pre-Covid times. So it’s a bargain for now. ESPN has a ton of sports content. Their Unlimited tier almost makes the idea of chaining different services together to get all the sports kind of pointless. After acquiring mlb.tv, the only interesting sports events that they don’t offer are the World Series, top-tier Big Ten and Notre Dame football, most NFL football, and top-tier English soccer and Champions League soccer. Which is handy for them, because all of those are super expensive to broadcast.
The easy way for ESPN to make baseball available is to allow MLB.tv paying subscribers to have a pass-through to the games. If they want to include MLB.tv as part of another tier or bundle but not require it, I think that might be a good idea as well. We don’t exactly know how watching baseball will be in 2026, but we can guarantee that rolling it into an ESPN bundle exclusively would make us furious.
