ESPN Will Stop Airing Major League Baseball After 2025 Season In Widely Expected End Of Long-Term Partnership

As had been widely expected, ESPN has officially decided to opt out of its Major League Baseball rights deal after the 2025 season.

“We are grateful for our longstanding relationship with Major League Baseball and proud of how ESPN’s coverage super-serves fans. In making this decision, we applied the same discipline and fiscal responsibility that has built ESPN’s industry-leading live events portfolio as we continue to grow our audience across linear, digital and social platforms,” the Disney-owned sports operation said in a statement. “As we have been throughout the process, we remain open to exploring new ways to serve MLB fans across our platforms beyond 2025.”

The split had been predicted given the downward trajectory of MLB ratings in recent years apart from October playoffs and the World Series. The move was first reported by The Athletic, which indicated the league was dissatisfied with the decreased presence for MLB on ESPN. The company, which used MLB games and studio shows as a major draw starting in the 1980s as it was beginning its rise to the top of the pay-TV heap, recently limited the number of games and marginalized studio show Baseball Tonight.

ESPN is preparing for one of its biggest initiatives of its existence, the launch this fall of a stand-alone streaming version. Ahead of that debut, it has been looking to lock in certain rights, extending carriage of the NBA in an 11-year renewal signed last summer and reconsidering others given the larger austerity efforts occurring companywide at Disney and other media companies.

The move comes amid the splintering of rights packages as leagues chase more money.

Late last year, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Turner Sports lost its longtime NBA deal to an 11-year, $76 billion agreement that spreads TV rights between NBCU, Disney (which re-upped with the league) and Prime Video.

The NFL, which signed it’s own 11-year, $111 billion deal in 2021 with Paramount Global, NBCUniversal, Fox Corporation, and The Walt Disney Company, remains the biggest prize. There, also, streamers are making inroads with Netflix securing rights to an NFL doubleheader on Christmas Day last year.

The NFL has been increasingly willing to turn to streaming as a way of driving more distribution revenue and expand the audience for football. Games carried on streaming skew younger, in line with a key strategic priority for the league.