NEW YORK — NBC Sports is considering bidding on the newly available MLB rights for the 2026 to 2028 seasons, Jon Miller, President, Acquisitions & Partnerships, NBC Sports told the SportsPro conference in New York City Thursday morning.
ESPN and MLB have famously flamed out, terminating their current deal three seasons early, with hard feelings apparent. NBC has not aired Major League Baseball at a national level on linear television since 2000, although Peacock recently aired a slate of early Sunday games from 2022-2023.
“We lost Major League Baseball in 1990, we got it back five years later, we lost it again in 2001, Fox came in and made a preemptive bid, so we’ve had our nose pressed against the glass for a long time,” Miller said. “They’re currently going through an interesting process where a lot of people are kicking the tires on Major League Baseball opportunities. We are as well… baseball is a property that knows how to adapt, who knows how to take advantage of where they are. There’s so much great product out there with so many terrific athletes, so many compelling stories, great ownership, great markets, and so I’m excited for the future of baseball. I think it’s a very positive outlook for them.”
The ESPN package includes Sunday Night Baseball, the wild card round and the Home Run Derby.
Before commenting on MLB, Miller noted that many of the top sports on NBC and Peacock are ones that returned after a hiatus, citing the NFL, golf, and the NBA.
“A lot of the properties that we have now on our air we had and lost and are now back again,” he said. “Perfect example of that is the USGA. We had a great relationship with the USGA for 20 years. It went to Fox. COVID happened, and some things worked in our favor. We got the USGA back. The NBA we had we were away for 22 years, and now it’s back. We lost the NFL in 1998 for eight years, when they went with a Fox, CBS and ABC package, and we were on the outside looking in.”
Other Miller observations:
* NBC Sports in February 2026 has what is likely the busiest stretch of major sports programming in history. Inside of three weeks NBC has the Super Bowl, the winter Olympics and the NBA-All Star game. That should mean an advertising bonanza for NBC.
“That gives an advertiser and a marketer a real comfort level to know when they come and do a deal with NBC and they get exposed and integrated into all of those different properties that they can really get their messaging out there,” he said.
* Asked how NBC was approaching Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara, California, Miller said a good comparison would be how NBC treated the 50th anniversary season of SNL. SNL’s celebration included a three hour anniversary show at Radio City Music Hall, a concert, and a documentary on the show. “220 million people touched some part of that SNL 50th anniversary,” he said.
What that means specifically for NBC’s plan for the Super Bowl he did not say. But the Super Bowl for all the host broadcasters have become major corporate wide initiatives to promote and highlight different parts of their portfolio. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro cited a similar strategy for Disney’s Super Bowl in 2027.
* Two of the more successful sports programs on NBC and Peacock–the English Premier League and Ryder Cup – had interesting origin stories that Miller told. His then 18-year-old son in 2011 first flagged the EPL for him, which he knew nothing about. That’s where the idea came from.
And the Ryder Cup NBC first aired in 1991, four months after Operation Desert Storm. The two main sponsors of the broadcast pulled out with the start of the war. Miller, who had championed the idea, said he was all but berated by his boss Dick Ebersol who asked if the network could get out of the deal. Miller said no, and NBC only sold half the ad inventory.
“We lost a ton of money on it. And Dick was, like, `you’re getting out of the Ryder Cup deal. As soon as this Ryder Cup is over,’ and I just kind of said, `Okay.’”
The second day of the event on Kiawah Island had a delayed start, pushing the competition into the early evening hours, bumping news. Ebersol was again very unhappy, Miller said, even though the day featured an amazing comeback by the Americans that in golf is known as the War by the Shore.
Sunday morning Ebersol called Miller, who was expecting another negative talk,
“I’m in the production comp. Now I’m thinking about what my next job is going to be, because this has been such a disaster.”
But Ebersol was euphoric. NBC at the time was owned by General Electric, whose CEO was the legendary Jack Welch. Welch as it happened watched the Saturday early evening American comeback, and told Ebersol afterwards it was the best thing he had ever seen on NBC.
Welch “would call Dick at home that Sunday morning to tell him this was the greatest thing he’d ever seen on NBC, and he wanted to make sure we keep it and do whatever you have to do to make sure we don’t ever lose it.”
GE in 2011 sold NBC to Comcast, so that connection is long gone. But the Ryder Cup is still on NBC, whose current contract extends to 2031.
