ESPN tells MLB No Soup for You, Cuts Ties with America’s Former Pastime

If you’re looking for baseball these days, and let’s be honest, why would you be, you may want to skip past the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader.  After next season, the only baseball highlights you’ll be seeing on that network will be edited shorts on SportsCenter, and even those leads might be buried.

I speak, of course, of ESPN, the new disillusioned dictators of America’s Got Talent, a network that regularly airs women’s college basketball, probably because it draws higher ratings than baseball.  It must, otherwise both sports would still be peacefully cohabitating within the friendly confines of Bristol, Connecticut.  This is a network, owned by Disney, that should have money to burn, albeit more efficiently.  Harkening back to the days it first aired, ESPN now broadcasts pickleball, they show darts, they friggin’ show cornhole tournaments.  I swear I saw competitive pillow fighting on the network recently.  Yet the sport formerly known as our nation’s pastime, one that once received $550 million a year from ESPN and that has been in business with the network since 1990, has been shown the front door.

We’ve talked at length about the reasons I no longer watch baseball, i.e., the cancelled World Series in 1994, the sport turning a blind eye on steroid usage to get itself back in our good graces only to turn its back on the players that saved the sport.  I broke up with baseball long before ESPN did.  If any other corporation were mismanaged so egregiously, they’d have gone bankrupt long ago.  Baseball might not be far behind.

While the NHL scored big with its 4 Nations Face-Off, and the NBA continues to swing and miss, professional sports must constantly find new ways to appease the fickle viewer.  Now more than ever before, television is a ratings game with paychecks featuring multiple zeroes and commas, with multiple bidders vying for our attention.  When one of the largest networks in the biz would rather give millions of dollars to a guy in a cowboy hat and tank top that asks nagging questions of a naggier quarterback, it’s time to take a close look in the mirror.  Probably for ESPN and definitely for baseball.

Major League Baseball got its dream matchup in last year’s World Series: Yankees vs. Dodgers.  Yet nobody outside those cities cared.  Cities with storied baseball traditions saw the season end with a whimper of a finale, largely because the result was expected and anticlimactic. 

I currently reside in another city with a proud baseball tradition that can’t find a stadium to house its team and hasn’t been able to for years.  It’d be comical if it weren’t so tragic.  Who knew Major League Baseball suffered from a homeless problem?  The 2025 “Tampa Bay” Rays have become couch surfers, officially playing their home games in the spring training stadium of one of its biggest rivals.  While a far more intimate setting, if the “home team” can’t fill the ballpark’s 11,000 seats, this will go down as one of the worst decisions the sport has ever seen, or worse, a sign that no one cares.

As generations pass, attention spans get thinner.  Viewers crave instant gratification.  While the suspense of a good baseball game will always remain, we no longer have time for it.  No one under the age of 50 cares to spend an entire summer waiting for a result that more and more might seem like a foregone conclusion.  The average age of the baseball viewer ranks right up there with horse racing and golf and before you debate this point with me, ask yourself how much horse racing and golf you’ve been watching lately.

We’ve seen baseball make recent changes that have worked.  Putting a time clock on pitchers handling their mound business saw game times shorten considerably.  They’ve also adjusted intentional walks and extra innings rules to make sure we no longer see games go fifteen innings, but these are changes that could have been made long ago.  Now it might be too late.  It also means we’re getting less baseball for our money.

If ESPN no longer wanting to be in the baseball business isn’t big news, it’s certainly symbolic of the times.  While another network will undoubtedly pick up the broadcasts, Apple and Roku already have contracts, they won’t be paying top dollar which means that backloaded contract Shohei Ohtani just signed might backfire on the game’s most marketable athlete.

There’s also the question of salary caps and how the lack thereof continues to alienate the average fan.  The Mets’ payroll in 2024 ($314 million) was over five times that of Oakland’s ($62 million).  While other sports leagues emphasize parity, awarding GMs who can manage a balanced roster, Major League Baseball GMs are like those snooty women at the overpriced mall with as much plastic in their purse as they have in their face. 

Fact: Last year’s World Series ratings were the highest in almost a decade.  Another fact: Those ratings were half that of the post-seasons that aired in the 90s, and a third of the ratings they drew in the 70s and 80s.  Meanwhile, the NFL keeps chugging along.  The Super Bowl draws more and more viewership every year without fail, despite this year featuring two teams that fans have grown tired of.  We mourn the end of football season because we know baseball season is near; we celebrate the end of the baseball season because we know football is upon us.

Advertisers paid 8 million dollars for a single minute of Super Bowl airtime.  ESPN won’t pay baseball 8 million for anything.  I take that back.  They might cough up that much to break their contract early.  Netflix, Amazon and other streaming services are all in a bidding war for live sports, but only live sports that draw viewers.  Major League Baseball no longer does that, at least not for the Tik Tok generation.  Furthermore, while the NFL has succeeded in attracting more female viewers, Major League Baseball has failed to effectively target this audience.  What’s to say about a sport that’s been cancelled by a dying network?

We could go on and on about what baseball has done wrong over the years, but I’ve grown as tired of discussing that as I have of the sport itself.  The point is that baseball is now reaping what it’s sewn.  If they care to continue to draw new fans and revenue, they must look to make changes while still holding true to its past.  They must embrace their history, warts and all, while stepping into its future, assuming it has one.

It’s too late for me.  I stopped watching games long ago.

Major League Baseball points to increased ticket sales over the last two years as a spike in popularity.  This may be true in some markets.  Furthermore, ESPN’s refusal to renew their contract might be a result of expanded streaming services and localized coverage.  The game has changed and so has the way we watch it, if we watch it.  Baseball hasn’t been as proactive as other sports in adjusting to the way we do so.  Quite the opposite.

“We have seen ESPN scale back their baseball coverage and investment in a way that is not consistent with the sport’s appeal” was MLB’s official statement, which reeks of a scorned lover refusing to admit the relationship is over.  ESPN is now seeing other people while Major League Baseball isn’t getting clicks on its dating profile and sits desperately at home waiting for its phone to ring.

MLB’s clock is ticking; their contracts with Fox and Turner expire in 2028.  The Commissioner’s Office better come up with ways to rebrand in any way they know how.  While it might be a tad too early to bury baseball entirely, the shovels are out, and the dirt is graveside.

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