NBC Sports president Jon Miller reveals how NBC convinced MLB to sacrifice revenue in new deal

NBC Sports president Jon Miller offered a candid account this week of how the network convinced Major League Baseball to accept a below-market deal to return to broadcast television.

Speaking with Puck’s John Ourand at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas, Miller confirmed that NBC was not the highest bidder when MLB went looking for a replacement after ESPN opted out of its $550 million-per-year deal in early 2025. The industry expectation at the time was that whoever replaced ESPN would pay less, but at least approach that number. NBC came in at roughly $200 million — less than half — and the league still chose them over streaming platforms that were offering considerably more.

The argument Miller made to Rob Manfred was that reach, promotional power, and the ability to build stars on a broadcast platform that still touches more households than any streaming service, was worth more to baseball in the long run than a bigger check from a partner that would put the games behind a paywall.

“We felt that if you could sacrifice revenue in exchange for reach, that we could do a lot to really showcase and elevate your property,” he said.

NBC had Sunday Night Football locked in and the NBA returning under its new deal, and adding baseball completed a 51-out-of-52-weeks Sunday primetime sports strategy that gave the network the runway to put baseball in front of football and basketball audiences every week. Miller had seen the opening developing for a couple of years, watching ESPN’s relationship with the sport deteriorate publicly enough that Manfred was calling the network a shrinking platform in memos to his own owners.

“We first met with baseball a couple of years ago,” Miller said, “and it was clear that their relationship with ESPN was probably going to change.”

What the league got in return for taking less money was Sam Flood’s production team — the same group behind Sunday Night Football — now running Sunday Night Baseball from top to bottom. Jason Benetti came over from Fox as the lead play-by-play voice, and with him came a rotating local analyst model that gives each broadcast texture specific to the teams playing that week, rather than the generic national product most Sunday baseball packages have defaulted to.

Fox has had Saturday night baseball for years and has done well with it, but Miller’s argument was that Sunday nights gave the sport something different.

“I felt like we could deliver on a week-in, week-out basis on Sunday nights a lot of the same elements that we do for Sunday Night Football,” he acknowledged.

Miller was at NBC in 1990, when the network last aired baseball, and the memory of losing it has clearly stayed with him. NBC had carried the sport since 1945 — 45 years — and part of what he was selling Manfred on was that NBC understood what it meant to have baseball and what it felt like to lose it, in a way a streaming platform simply could not.

“I think the leadership at Major League Baseball is really impressive,” Miller said. “Rob Manfred and his team have done a spectacular job on the pace of the game. You’ve got some great stars out there, and I really thought that Major League Baseball should be on NBC.”