ESPN, MLB Restart Talks In Tacit Acknowledgement Of Another ESPN Mistake
MLB ratings are way up, and ESPN might want back in
Major League Baseball is on a winning streak.
Attendance across the sport is up significantly since rule changes were enacted ahead of the 2023 season. Perhaps even more importantly, television ratings are also up. Across every network, in every major broadcast window, and particularly for all-important national games.
When the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted the New York Yankees in June, Fox announced that its broadcast was up 16 percent from last year's MLB coverage. ESPN has routinely drawn double-digit increases in 2025 compared to their 2024 broadcasts.
Seems like a business you'd want to invest in, right? Not for ESPN! Not when it could waste billions on the declining NBA!
READ: ESPN Will No Longer Broadcast MLB Games
Well, on Tuesday, news broke that ESPN might have learned the error of its ways, after months of MLB exploring interest with other broadcast partners.
CLEVELAND - MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and All-Star game MVP Shane Bieber #57 of the Cleveland Indians during the 2019 MLB All-Star Game at Progressive Field on July 9, 2019. (Photo by Kirk Irwin/Getty Images)
ESPN Hoping To Stay In The Baseball Business?
On Tuesday, ESPN PR announced that their Sunday Night Baseball broadcast of the Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins averaged 2 million viewers, peaking at 2.3 million. That marked the continuation of ESPN's most-watched season of Sunday Night Baseball in eight years.
Maybe not so coincidentally, on Tuesday, The Athletic reported that MLB and ESPN had restarted talks to rescue their relationship.
According to the report, the two sides have discussed a new rights deal, with the potential for a new agreement to include local broadcasting rights. How such an agreement would play out is still unclear, as is the potential for it to actually come to fruition.
But the fact that the two sides are back in discussions indicates that ESPN realized that it might have made yet another mistake.
While NBA ratings continue to fall, MLB has shot up. Baseball, college football and the NFL are the obvious places to invest your media rights dollars, but the network instead spent a fortune on the NBA because the two sides share political beliefs.
Not a great business strategy.
Several other networks or streaming services have jumped in to bid on ESPN's package of baseball games and events, including Apple TV+ and NBC. Home Run Derby, playoffs, an exclusive national broadcast window in a sport with a growing audience. The good news for ESPN is it might not be too late to fix its unforced error.