The MLB regular season is drawing to a close, and with it, the first of three seasons under the league’s stop-gap national television rights deals.
After ESPN decided to opt out of its Sunday Night Baseball deal following the 2025 season (which MLB says was a mutual decision), the league was on the clock to find a new partner to take over its premier regular-season package and recoup some of the $550 million ESPN was paying annually for it.
As it would turn out, MLB would secure multiple new partners and keep ESPN on board for a different package. NBC took over most of ESPN’s old inventory, which includes Sunday Night Baseball and the Wild Card round. Netflix secured rights to Opening Night and the Home Run Derby. And ESPN paired a new package of about 30 weeknight games with rights to license MLB.tv for its app, which will include in-market rights to about half of the league beginning next season.
The trio of deals will run only three years, until after the 2028 season when MLB’s other national television deals with Fox and TNT Sports expire.
Assessing how Year 1 of the short-term arrangements went, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred saw a number of positives.
“NBC, from Day 1, was about reach for us and they certainly delivered that,” Manfred told Sports Business Journal. “Equally important, they leaned into baseball. The promotion surrounding things like Opening Day has just been phenomenal.”
The viewership would seem to support Manfred’s assessment. NBC’s 14 Sunday Night Baseball telecasts averaged 2.7 million viewers (including Peacock streaming figures via Adobe Analytics). It’s the package’s highest average audience since 2007, though comparing NBC to ESPN is a bit apples-to-oranges as a number of Peacock-exclusive games are excluded from the data.
On Netflix, the commissioner struck a more measured tone, acknowledging that there is a sacrifice inherent in putting games on a streaming service.
“This is the balance that you have to strike. There is a younger demographic that’s available there, but it’s a streaming service, and the people in the bundle are not necessarily used to going into a streaming service,” he told SBJ.
Netflix MLB viewership was largely underwhelming. The Home Run Derby was the least-watched since 2003, and the Field of Dreams Game averaged just 1.66 million viewers.
The final test of MLB’s short-term deals will be NBC and Peacock’s broadcasts of the Wild Card round in less than a week’s time. Fans have been accustomed to watching those games on ESPN and ABC. Now, they’ll shift to NBC and Peacock. With more games on broadcast television, but some games exclusively on a streamer, it will be interesting to see if viewership can keep pace with ESPN’s benchmark.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.