ESPN And MLB Agreed To End Contract Will NBC Become New Home For Baseball
For more than three decades the MLB and the ‘Worldwide Leader in Sports’ brought baseball into American homes. ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” became a tradition that started in 1990. However, earlier this year both parties agreed to mutually opt out of their agreement. With ESPN and the MLB having agreed to end their contract we wonder will NBC become the new home for baseball. Of course in this digital age, baseball games are streamed across multiple platforms and several networks.
However, with ESPN’s TV rights set to expire at the end of the 2025 season several interested parties have emerged wanting to acquire some of those rights. Those TV rights include “Sunday Night Baseball” games, the Wild Card Series and Home Run Derby. As reported by Joe Flint and Jared Diamond of the Wall Street Journal:
NBCUniversal has made an offer to Major League Baseball to take over the package of regular-season and postseason games that ESPN is walking away from, offering much less than its rival currently pays, according to people familiar with the matter.
ESPN in February exercised a clause to opt out of the final three years of its $550 million-a-year contract after the 2025 season. The move ended a 35-year partnership with MLB and put the rights into play for others.
If NBC acquires the rights then the events would also be aired on their streaming partner, Peacock. Peacock had attempted to air regular season baseball games in 2022 called the “MLB Sunday Leadoff” games. But it had little success and Roku became the home of MLB Sunday streams last season. Roku gave fans the access to stream the games without the need for a subscription or a required sign-up. Obviously, free is better than having to pay to watch America’s favorite pastime.
ESPN And MLB Agreed To End Contract Will NBC Become New Home For Baseball
Other parties interested in acquiring the rights include Amazon and Netflix. However, president and chief operating officer of Fox, John Nallen, also said that his network was looking into acquiring the ESPN package. He stated, “I think what will come to market in some form will be some baseball product, particularly after baseball and ESPN announced that after the season their relationship would change. So, baseball has been a great product for us and we’ll probably look at that and look at it in the context of how it makes sense to us overall.”
So nothing is written in stone at this point but apparently multiple entities are interested in keeping baseball on television. We’ll have to wait and see who emerges as the victor in what could be a serious bidding war.
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