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ESPN Broke Up With MLB Because the Money Just Didn’t Add Up

ESPN Broke Up With MLB Because the Money Just Didn’t Add Up

The calculus behind ESPN’s decision to walk away from its longstanding partnership with Major League Baseball may have been a bit knottier than a simple cost-benefit analysis would otherwise suggest—nothing’s ever simple when so many terminal zeroes are involved—but you don’t need an advanced economics degree to intuit that Disney’s departure was inevitable.

For ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro, a lifelong baseball fan, the numbers just didn’t add up. MLB wasn’t pulling its weight—at least not to the tune of $550 million per year in rights fees—and ESPN’s move to opt out of the two final seasons of the contract may be interpreted as an act of fiscal discretion rather than an austerity measure.

Perhaps nothing bears this out like the ad sales receipts. According to iSpot data, MLB games in 2024 accounted for 2.2% of the total national linear spend on the ESPN flagship, which translates to $58.5 million over the course of the season. While that’s not a negligible sum, it’s also eminently replaceable. The MLB package last year was ESPN’s 10th-biggest driver of ad sales revenue, trailing the likes of the NHL ($62.8 million), as well as the studio shows Get Up ($79.5 million) and First Take ($96.6 million).

Among the sports holdings in ESPN’s portfolio that may be used to spackle in the Sunday Night Baseball-shaped hole in the lineup are the Stanley Cup Final playoffs in the spring, the College World Series in June and the WNBA in mid-to-late summer.

That advertising in MLB games only clawed back around 10.6% of ESPN’s annual rights fee is less an indictment of baseball’s older demos and the general state of the impressions market than it is a function of basic cable economics. Of the $17.6 billion in revenue generated by the sports unit in 2024, affiliate fees kicked in $10.4 billion, or 59.1% of the total, while advertising accounted for $4.39 billion, or 24.9%. In other words, distribution remains the primary driver of revenue at ESPN—this despite the ongoing erosion of the traditional pay-TV bundle.

Speaking of which, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s assessment of ESPN’s place in the hierarchy doesn’t jibe with reality. In the letter Manfred sent to MLB owners on Thursday morning, he states that ESPN “was available in 53.6M homes” as of December 2024. According to Nielsen, the commish undercounted the house by more than 10 million subscribers; as of this month, ESPN and ESPN2 were both in 64.2 million households.

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