As it turns out, the Worldwide Leader and Major League Baseball aren’t quite ready to leave one another at the altar just yet.
According to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, ESPN and MLB have quietly reopened talks to keep baseball on the network for the foreseeable future. Commissioner Rob Manfred has drawn a somewhat firm line in the sand when it comes to a new media rights deal, but the conversations are still in the early stages.
If talks progress, Marchand reports that the focus will likely be on local rights and select pieces of ESPN’s former package.
Earlier this year, ESPN and MLB announced their decision to part ways. ESPN was pushing to renegotiate a much friendlier rights fee, while Manfred publicly aired his frustration with how the network handled baseball.
Now, Manfred may be having some buyer’s remorse about the opt-out, and it’s not hard to see why. Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN is having a standout season in both ratings and viewership. The Dodgers-Yankees World Series rematch posted the highest ratings for the marquee regular-season package in seven years. So far, SNB is tracking its best numbers since 2017.
While ESPN and MLB rekindle their discussions, other players like Apple TV+ and NBC are already positioning themselves to pick up some of the rights on the table, including Sunday Night Baseball and select playoff games. ESPN’s mutual exit from the current deal covers marquee properties like Sunday Night Baseball, early-round playoff matchups, and the Home Run Derby.
These patchwork agreements — expected to be finalized by mid-July — are designed to keep baseball on the air through 2028. That’s when MLB’s other big national rights deals with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery expire. After that, Manfred wants to overhaul the entire rights structure, combining national and local packages into a single, streamlined strategy. And it sure sounds like, because these are short-term deals, he’s willing to sacrifice top-dollar offers in favor of reaching the largest possible audience
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.