Jeff Passan is staying at ESPN, and he will have more to do there than ever before.
ESPN announced Monday that Passan has signed a multi-year contract extension, keeping him in place as the network’s senior MLB insider. As part of the new deal, Passan will launch his own baseball podcast in conjunction with Omaha Productions — Peyton Manning’s production company — giving him a dedicated platform to expand on the kind of reporting and storytelling he has been doing across ESPN’s properties since joining the network in 2019.
“I came to ESPN seven years ago hoping to spend the rest of my career telling stories to the biggest and most passionate audience in the sports world,” Passan said in a statement. “I’m extraordinarily lucky to work with a team of great reporters, editors, producers, hosts, and analysts. And I can’t wait to deliver an entirely new kind of baseball show for those who love the best game in the world.”
“Jeff is one of the industry’s leading journalists and most-respected voices in baseball,” ESPN president of content Burke Magnus added. “We’re delighted that Jeff will expand his presence at ESPN with his own podcast and continue to lead our breaking news coverage of MLB.”
The extension comes after a period of genuine uncertainty around ESPN’s baseball coverage. When ESPN and MLB mutually opted out of their $550 million annual rights deal following the 2025 season, the natural question was what that meant for the network’s investment in the sport going forward. ESPN and MLB have since found their way back to each other, though the relationship looks different now, being that the network gave up Sunday Night Baseball and the Wild Card round to NBC and ceded the Home Run Derby to Netflix, instead pivoting toward a local strategy built around MLB.tv on its streaming app and a limited weekday broadcast package. It’s a smaller footprint on the national stage, but ESPN is still in the baseball business, and re-signing Passan — with a podcast on top — makes clear the network intends to stay that way.
Passan came to ESPN in January 2019 after 13 years at Yahoo Sports, where ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro had first hired him when Pitaro ran the company’s sports operation. The idea from the beginning was to build him into the baseball equivalent of Adam Schefter and Adrian Wojnarowski — the authoritative voice who breaks news first and sets the terms of the conversation around the sport. He has largely lived up to that billing. He was named National Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association in both 2021 and 2023, received the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting in 2022 for his story on then-San Francisco Giants outfielder Drew Robinson, and has been a fixture across ESPN platforms from Baseball Tonight to The Pat McAfee Show to Pardon the Interruption.
He has also not been shy about using that platform to say things that cut against ESPN’s own interests, which includes — but is not limited to — calling out MLB’s recent media rights strategy as a series of missteps, and at one point referring to an MLB owners’ offer to players during the lockout as a “shit sandwich” in language that got the audio pulled from an ESPN podcast.
Passan, who grew up in Cleveland, graduated from Syracuse, and lives in the Kansas City area, is also the author of “The Arm,” a New York Times bestseller about pitcher injuries, and co-wrote “Death to the BCS” with Dan Wetzel. This year, he and his family established the Rich Passan Sports Writing Scholarship to support emerging journalists.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.