Bomani Jones laments ESPN’s role in baseball’s fading national relevance

Bomani Jones didn’t set out to stop following baseball. Or tennis. Or boxing. But once he stopped watching 30-60 minutes of SportsCenter every day, he found himself knowing a lot less about all of them.

The connection wasn’t hard to trace. As SportsCenter has lost some of its cultural relevance, so have the sports that quietly depended on it. The show used to resemble a daily sports newspaper on TV, providing just enough information to stay informed, whether you were interested in it or not. But once that habit disappeared, so did entire sports from the national radar.

“I knew who everybody was,” Jones said on his The Right Time with Bomani Jones podcast. “When I talked to my friends who were SportsCenter anchors, they knew who everybody is. When I talk to my friends who aren’t SportsCenter anchors, they don’t know who none of these people are.”

That knowledge gap is a direct byproduct of the media environment shifting from “show me what’s out there” to “I’ll choose what I want.” Sports that don’t scream for your attention — the ones that rely on structure and routine to stay in the conversation — quietly fade out. And once they’re gone, you barely notice.

As Bomani Jones and others have noted, SportsCenter was never just about highlights. It was about shared context. It was about accidentally learning who the No. 3 tennis player in the world was just because they beat someone in Rome on a Tuesday. It was about seeing a walk-off in Milwaukee, even if you lived in Miami. You didn’t have to be a boxing fan to know who was headlining the next pay-per-view. You just needed to watch SportsCenter.

That ecosystem doesn’t exist anymore.

“It all comes down to a couple of things,” said guest Howard Bryant. “No. 1, it’s where do you get your information, and how routinely do you get your information? You have a breakdown of routine. Routine is usually where you get everything, and once you run out of routine, you realize that things aren’t that important. Things just disappear. Things don’t matter. You have a list of sports that are reliant on those types of programs, where you’re going to get a snippet of something every single day. Now, you can go weeks without getting any of that. And you can go a very long time without having to engage with sports you don’t immediately take an interest in.”

That’s why it drives Bryant crazy when people call this a “pivot.” It’s not a pivot. It’s a collapse, happening in real time, and everyone’s pretending it’s a strategy.

Bryant, a veteran columnist and author of more than 10 books, isn’t optimistic about what’s left. In his view, there’s no longer room for tennis. Horse racing is gone. Golf has a sliver of space, but barely. It’s a football world now, and most other sports have been pushed to the fringe due to the influence of extremely powerful corporate entities.

We can feel that change most drastically in baseball.

“Baseball is interesting because a clear decision was made around ESPN — maybe around 15 years ago — where somebody looked at the numbers and said, ‘Hey man, we start talking about baseball, people start changing the channel. So, we really not gonna do that no more,'” said Jones. “It could be the World Series. It’s not happening, right? And the rest of us — and us being the people that do the kind of work that I do — we kind of followed suit, because why would you talk about something that people don’t talk about? But, on the other side of it, people will tell you that local baseball ratings and attendance, all those numbers, are good. Which is to say there’s still an interest in baseball, but it is a poor national talker.”

Jones went on to explain that baseball was built for a different media environment.

“[Baseball] is a sport that is very well served when the center of the sports consumer’s news existence was the local newspaper,” Jones continued. “And the local newspaper did the job. You can’t pay attention to 30 baseball teams at one time in a way you can pay attention to 32 football teams, or the way you can pay attention to 30 basketball teams. Baseball, you watch your team in your league, and you watch that team 162 games going all around the circuit, and by the time the year was over, you knew every team there was in that league. You knew everybody’s bullpen. All of that stuff. All it took was a couple three-game series, and you would then be caught up.”

But once the sports fan became a national sports fan, baseball got left behind. The national consumer didn’t have time for the slow build or the long season. The modern sports economy demands immediacy, and baseball doesn’t play that game.

That shift has had real consequences. We’re watching some of the greatest talents in baseball history, and yet they struggle to break through culturally.

“As the sports consumer became a national sports consumer, the interest in baseball by the people who aren’t all the way into baseball, that fell,” Jones added. “And then as a result, we’re in a place where we’ve seen some of the greatest baseball players ever to walk in the last 15 years. Mike Trout’s a great example. [Shohei] Ohtani, of course, right now jumps off the page. Ohtani, I think, is famous as an idea, but not famous as a person, and that’s not just because of the Japanese factor. Ichiro felt more famous than he did. Hideo Nomo, when he first got started, felt more famous than he does.

“And I think that’s really as ESPN became the operation that dictated everybody’s coverage — even the networks that compete with them — baseball was the biggest loser in terms of how we view its biggest teams and its biggest stars.”

And it wasn’t always this way.

There used to be a time when, once the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup wrapped, summer belonged to baseball. That window — June through August — was the sport’s time to shine.

Now? First Take is dissecting Dak Prescott’s legacy in early June. ESPN is spending more time on OTAs and NBA free agency buzz than on the only live sport actually happening. Somehow, the sport that once owned the summer now struggles to get a word in. Even when it’s the only thing actually happening, it’s treated like background noise.

And to Jones and Bryant, that’s a direct result of something bigger than just shifting tastes. It’s the outcome of a media ecosystem where coverage isn’t driven by what’s happening; it’s driven by what sells. The games didn’t change. The interests were redirected.