Rob Manfred hints at expanding national inventory in new TV deals

How fans access baseball will look very different after the 2028 MLB season.

2028 is the final season covered by MLB’s current set of national media rights deals with Fox, TNT Sports, NBC, ESPN, Netflix, and Apple. After that, it’s up to MLB to determine how best to distribute broadcast rights for a new era in sports consumption.

MLB has long relied on the value of its local rights deals to propel the league forward. When the cable bundle was strong, regional sports networks could shell out large sums of money to secure broadcast rights for the local club. That was often over 150 nights of highly desirable programming each year, making these channels a must-have for pay TV distributors.

That’s no longer the case. Countless households have cut the cord, and regional sports networks are far from essential for distributors, which increasingly place these channels in higher, more expensive tiers.

The paradigm shift has placed greater emphasis on maximizing the value of MLB’s national broadcast rights. That too has been a challenge. Just last year, ESPN opted out of its Sunday Night Baseball deal, which it paid $550 million per year for. That package was then resold to NBC for just $200 million per year.

Still, there’s logic to the premise that national games are worth more. After all, more people will watch a nationally televised game than a game that only airs in two local markets.

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred wants to capitalize on that logic. Last week, the commissioner suggested that in MLB’s next set of rights deals, the league will allocate more games to national windows, leaving fewer for local broadcasts.

According to a report by Evan Drellich in The Athletic, Manfred made a veiled threat at teams looking to protect their local inventory. “Remember, we can take as many games as we want from any club in the national package with a majority vote of the clubs,” the commissioner said. “I don’t necessarily need 30 (teams’ rights) wall-to-wall to get where I want.”

Manfred was referring to the fact that, as it stands, nearly half the league has already ceded control of its local broadcasts to MLB. That number is expected to grow before the league goes to market in 2028. And with more than half of MLB clubs in alignment with the league, it’d be easy to pass a measure to add more national inventory at the expense of local inventory.

Teams with lucrative local deals, like the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, or Chicago Cubs, would prefer to keep as much local inventory to themselves as possible. Clubs split revenue from national broadcast rights evenly, but get to keep the majority of local broadcast revenue for themselves. The rank-and-file realize that adding national inventory would increase the overall media revenue pie, but top-end clubs would have to sacrifice a competitive advantage over teams with less lucrative local broadcast deals.

As it stands, MLB caps the number of exclusive national broadcasts a team can appear on at 17 per season. That means teams like the Dodgers and Yankees can still broadcast 145 games per year in their local markets. The league would prefer to sell more marquee matchups featuring its best teams to national broadcasters.

“The good thing about this business, because it’s not that complicated, right — you make more from national games than you make from local games,” Manfred said. “I want to get into a paradigm where I can maximize the amount of national revenue that I get.”

The other part of the plan is to centralize MLB’s local rights, as the league has already begun to do, to sell them in bulk to a streaming platform. As the economics of regional sports networks collapse, MLB is banking on local rights being worth more in the aggregate than separated, as they are now.

Both changes mean watching MLB games will look vastly different for fans come 2029. Before then, the league has plenty of work to do to get its top teams on board with the go-forward plan.