MLB commissioner Rob Manfred appeared on The Pat McAfee Show on Wednesday to make the case for how baseball’s new broadcast structure handles two things he says the league is prioritizing above everything else.
“The second thing that we’re really, really focused on is the reach of our broadcasts,” Manfred said. “I think the two touch words, I said one before, is reach and discoverability. We have to get to the biggest possible audience we can get to, and fans need to know how they can find our games. That’s why I like the ESPN+ platform for our local broadcasts. It is kind of a hub where people can go and figure out how they get their games.”
The local broadcast situation Manfred is describing stems directly from how the new ESPN deal is structured. When the two sides mutually opted out of their previous agreement, ESPN traded its national marquee inventory — Sunday Night Baseball, the Home Run Derby, the Wild Card round — for in-market rights covering six teams under league control in Cleveland, San Diego, Seattle, Minnesota, Arizona, and Colorado, plus licensing the out-of-market MLB.tv package for its direct-to-consumer app.
But the out-of-market package came with its fair share of confusion before Opening Day, and the six in-market clubs won’t be available on ESPN+ until next season. Baseball in 2026 is spread across seven different platforms, making discoverability a real challenge.
As Awful Announcing noted when the deals were finalized, MLB saved face on the ESPN breakup but not necessarily financially. NBC and Netflix together are paying roughly $250 million annually for what ESPN had been paying $550 million for; and the league had to throw in additional inventory to bridge the gap. What it got in return was a presence on more platforms than at any point in its history, with 47 over-the-air windows this season.
Manfred has been transparent that the current arrangement is a three-year bridge to 2029, when every national deal expires, and the league renegotiates everything at once toward the more NFL-style national structure he has described as the long-term goal. Reach and discoverability are the two words he is building toward. The current deals run through 2028, and between now and then, whether fans of all 30 teams can actually find their games on any given night is the only measurement that matters.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.