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ESPN will be entering its 36th season of broadcasting Sunday Night Baseball and Tuesday announced that Karl Ravech, David Cone, Eduardo Perez and Buster Olney will be its SNB broadcast announcing team. They’ll be entering their fourth season as SNB announcers.
But next month, ESPN can opt out of the final three years of its contract with MLB, according to Evan Drellich and Andrew Marchand in The Athletic.
What happens to baseball if this happens?
Major League Baseball is warning that it could walk away from ESPN if the network opts out of their national TV deal next month. After four decades of partnership, a new deal with ESPN would be unlikely following an opt out, a person briefed on the league’s thinking who was not authorized to speak publicly said Thursday.
The sides are continuing to talk, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said Thursday at the conclusion of the league’s owners’ meetings.
“We talk to ESPN all the time,” Manfred said. “They’re one of our big partners. … We both have an out in March of this year. Obviously, ‘25 is set. Yeah, we’ll continue to talk to them. And each side will make a decision whether they want to do anything with that.”
There are 550 million reasons MLB should not want this. That’s the amount ESPN is scheduled fo pay MLB each year for the 2026, 2027 and 2028 seasons. There’s a significant chunk of money the league cannot afford to lose. Based on the reported $12.1 billion league revenue recently reported, that’s about 4.5 percent of all the revenue the league takes in, a not insignificant amount.
The Athletic article says the two sides continue to talk, even as that opt-out approaches next month. Could that be restructured into a different sort of deal?
“Maybe that’s an 11-year deal from ’29 to ’40. And, you know, maybe that’s a $100 billion deal,” Terry McGuirk, chairman of the Atlanta Braves, said last month. “These are really big, big, big boxcar bets that (Manfred is) looking at for setting the future of baseball.”
But to get there, Manfred first wants to redo the sport’s local TV rights structure, a tricky political undertaking that will likely have to wait until collective bargaining with the players’ union in 2026. More MLB teams will also simply be out of contract with their local rightsholder come 2028.
The two other national TV rightsholders for MLB, Fox-TV and TBS, also have deals that end after 2028. So that would appear to be a watershed year for baseball on TV. You could see Manfred try to shoehorn all the teams into some sort of national package that would include both local and national broadcasts and involve all the broadcast partners. This might also go along with some sort of adjusted revenue sharing plan among MLB teams, though good luck getting the Dodgers to give up their huge local revenue and spread it around.
In any event, as noted in the Athletic article, we are looking at two very important inflection points for the future of baseball: 1) The expiration of the CBA on Dec. 1, 2026, and 2) The expiration of most national and local TV deals after the 2028 season.
I am not certain what shape or form baseball broadcasts will take after those inflection points. I am pretty certain that they will be distributed differently than they are now, and that MLB is going to try to maximize revenue out of all of them.
As always, we await developments.