ESPN and Major League Baseball stunned the sports media world when they both announced an opt-out of their current rights deal after the season that was scheduled to end in 2028.
Although there were rumors and reports that an opt-out may be coming, the reality of baseball no longer airing on ESPN is a shock to anyone who has watched the network over the last 30-plus years. But as ESPN changed and the sports media world changed with it, so did the standing and influence of baseball on the network.
Given the statements released by the parties involved, there’s definitely some hard feelings at play from the MLB side specifically as they feel they were slowly pushed aside by the WorldWide Leader. And as a look at the timeline of the declining relationship shows, it’s a fairly accurate assessment. For the last decade or more, MLB has seen its standing slowly decline as flashier topics and more explosive debates ruled the day. And in the end, the two sides drifted further apart than what was reconcilable in their current television contract.
Early 2010s: Declining influence vs NFL, NBA
If you turn on ESPN at any point in the day, you have about a 90% chance of seeing two sports discussed – football or basketball. Specifically, ESPN spends much of its time talking about the NFL and NBA with college football also getting a ton of airplay in the fall.
This didn’t happen overnight, but gradually as takes began to rule the day and highlights were de-emphasized, the 24/7 news cycles of the NFL and NBA began to dominate the daily sports conversation. For the NFL, it was only natural given the sport has supplanted baseball as the national pastime. For the NBA, the off-court drama following the league’s superstars has seen a constant church going all the way back to The Decision in 2010. 
For whatever reason, baseball hasn’t been able to match the popularity of the NFL or the interest in the NBA to warrant regular coverage around the clock at ESPN. And as it faded further from the spotlight, its presence became less significant.
Late 2010s: End of Baseball Tonight
For years, it was impossible to think of ESPN without Baseball Tonight. The program aired nightly on ESPN beginning in 1990 until coming to an end in 2017 after a run of layoffs at the network. Those layoffs hit Bristol’s baseball coverage particularly hard. The network let go of analysts Dallas Braden, Doug Glanville, Raul Ibanez, Jim Bowden, and Jayson Stark. For a time, MLB Network’s Intentional Talk was even syndicated on ESPN to try to help fill the gap, but that did not last long.
Baseball Tonight was an institution every night over the course of the season with a star studded panel that showed live look-ins and highlights from games. But as highlights went the way of the dodo, so too did ESPN’s focus on the sport. When there are 162 games during the season what happens on the field usually takes precedence over debates and narratives. It’s easy for Stephen A. Smith to rant about Jerry Jones and LeBron James, it’s less easy to rant about why a pitching change shouldn’t have happened in the top of the 8th inning during an August Padres-Dodgers game.
Ironically, current SportsCenter anchor Gary Striewski gave a social media tour of the old Baseball Tonight studio that currently sits abandoned in Bristol like ancient temple ruins as a shrine to what once was the network’s MLB coverage.
Someone asked me for a tour of the old Baseball Tonight studio on campus. Enjoy this heaping slice of nostalgia. pic.twitter.com/eNQgbTZyTe
— Gary Striewski (@garystriewski) February 19, 2025
Even though Baseball Tonight has continued to air alongside Sunday Night Baseball in recent years, it was never the same as when it was in its heyday.
What if: ESPN’s RSN opportunity thwarted by DOJ
One of the larger components for the transformative $71 billion Disney acquisition of the majority of Fox’s assets (initially announced as closer to $60 billion before a Comcast bid upped the price) were the 22 local RSNs included in the deal. In fact, Disney valued those 22 RSNs as nearly a third of the total value of the deal at over $20 billion.
Had the deal gone through, ESPN, via these rebranded RSNs, would essentially have had broadcast rights to the majority of all MLB, NHL, and NBA games with a much wider presence thanks to these local channels and rights.
It was that stranglehold across those sports that ended up nixing the deal as half a year later the Department of Justice announced that the deal could only go through if Disney sold the RSNs to another company. Less than a year later, Disney offloaded the RSNs to Sinclair in a deal that only returned $10 billion of the over $20 billion they agreed to pay a little more than a year before.
With RSNs in the midst of an ongoing collapse, many believe the DOJ’s decision is one of the biggest what if moments in all of sports media and one that would have had major implications for both ESPN and Major League Baseball.
In an alternate timeline, ESPN would have had the rights for a little over half of all MLB games, which would have likely springboarded and accelerated their streaming strategy. Perhaps Baseball Tonight would have found more stable footing or syndication on channels and platforms that collectively had millions of viewers that were already watching baseball. There is no doubt that baseball would have become a much more significant focus of ESPN’s overall content as well as business strategy had the deal gone through.
Early 2020s: Bare bones baseball
Instead, the writing might have been the wall for the ESPN-MLB relationship when the two sides announced their new broadcast deal in 2021. The agreement, which was supposed to run until 2028 before the opt-out went into effect, saw a vastly reduced presence for baseball games on the network.
ESPN went from televising 90 games per year all the way down to 30 per season at $550 million in rights fees annually. While ESPN did pick up some playoff games, they dumped mid-week national baseball coverage, which would have at least been an outlet and a bridge for continuing coverage throughout the season. With baseball relegated to Sunday Night Baseball, the sport became much more isolated on WorldWide Leader airwaves.
The opt-out comes with the reality that Sunday Night Baseball is coming off of a season where it scored its best ratings as a franchise since 2019. It should be especially troubling to the sport that even with baseball being in a good moment, ESPN felt its deal was no longer good value in light of some of the smaller, friendlier deals the league has signed elsewhere.
And as far as MLB’s presence on ESPN airwaves? It hit rock bottom in this time period when the network went an entire day of studio shows without even talking about the Wild Card playoff games it was airing that night. It’s hard to blame Rob Manfred when he noted in a statement about pulling the plug on the television deal, “Furthermore, we have not been pleased with the minimal coverage that MLB has received on ESPN’s platforms over the past several years outside of the actual live game coverage.”
Mid 2020s: ESPN playing MoneyBall?
In saying goodbye to the national pastime, ESPN is making a bold but ruthless calculation. It’s simply better off without it. ESPN has found alternatives like TGL that are still pulling in decent numbers without paying a huge rights fee. And consider that ESPN is paying $90 million in annual rights fees for F1 races that are pulling comparable numbers to MLB at a fraction of the cost (1.5 million vs 1.1 million average viewers). And ESPN has decided that even the F1 contract is not value for money anymore.
Instead, ESPN is going boom or bust with sports rights. While they lean on better valued deals like TGL, the NCAA, and the WNBA to invest airtime in, they are also splashing huge amounts of cash at major products that they view as untouchable. These include Monday Night Football, the expanded College Football Playoff, and the NBA. ESPN has re-upped or expanded rights on all of these in recent years. And when it comes to what the network covers on a daily basis, it makes total sense.
Unfortunately for MLB, ESPN has found that those calculations do not include baseball. And it might not for some time. As for what comes next, ESPN has shown that it has the capacity to freeze out sports after losing the rights for them. So whatever happens in the future and wherever MLB finally lands, it may make the last few years look like their golden age in Bristol.
