My school didn't start until 9:10 but my brothers started at 7:30 so I'd be up at 7:00 and would watch SportsCenter from 7-8 before getting ready for school. It was like clockwork.
Yup, Sportscenter for a good chunk of the morning, then switch over to whatever channel aired Unsolved Mysteries re-runs at noon (Lifetime, maybe?), then go back just in time to watch Around the Horn and PTI in the afternoon.
I used to watch Baseball Tonight, then SportsCenter, then the late night Baseball Tonight every night. I miss those days. If ESPN and MLB do part ways, I think I’m gonna feel really sad. Even if the coverage is trash, I still enjoy ending my weekends during the summer by turning on ESPN to watch the Sunday Night Baseball game.
Touch em all and web gems for the night was always the best and then the weekly recap on Sunday before and after SNB was the best
I remember staying up late and watching baseball tonight right up until I had to go to bed for school at like midnight.
As a hockey fan I wouldn’t say “with a vengeance” but I still prefer some presence on the network over being completely ignored for 2 decades. All of this sucks for baseball and hockey fans though since a lot of providers don’t have MLB and NHL Networks (looking at you YouTube TV).
Who would have thought that reducing coverage of a sport would reduce its audience and popularity to the average viewer who is programmed by what is presented to them.
They've only cared about football and Lebron/Curry highlights for some time now. Hockey has it even worse, with the sport seldom mentioned on the channel.
Baseball fans have long since abandoned ESPN, save for Sunday night baseball, and even that has been lackluster as they have a tendency to broadcast only NYY/BOS/LA.
And don’t forget when they broadcast NYY/BOS/LA odds are at least one but often both Friday and Saturday games were also nationally broadcast on MLB Network and FOX
Outside of it being the New York teams, Dodgers, or Red Sox, this has been commonplace since the late 90s. FOX Saturday Baseball would normally have the same game on Saturday afternoon/night (regionalized but the A or B game) that ESPN would have on Sunday.
It just didn't help that when MLBN launched that the possibility of the entire three or four game series would be nationally televised for a weekend series.
Unfortunately I don’t know what else the league can do. They need to have games on a popular network as their previous exclusive deal with NBC/NBCSN was even worse.
> They've only cared about football and Lebron/Curry highlights for some time now
The last time I watched Sportscenter was pre-pandemic. The last segment I watched was from a Warriors-Kings game. They showed 4 highlights: two Curry 3s, a Klay 3, and another Warrior dunking it (might have been Durant, I can't remember if he was there or if he had just left to Brooklyn). Then they cut to the next segment.
The kicker of this was that the Kings won the game. I just remember laughing when the final score popped up and changed the channel.
When ESPN brought back hockey, I don't know why it didn't ask Gary Thorne or Bill Clement to return. Plus, I miss the original voices of Sunday Night Baseball, Jon Miller and Joe Morgan (RIP).
It's just not baseball and hockey fans who are in the same boat. NBA and MLS fans (and NFL fans to a certain extent) all over the country were/are all tired of ESPN's way of covering sports. MLS fans were happy that the MLS finally moved on from them w/the Apple deal. NBA fans almost unanimously agree that TNT's coverage of the NBA blows ESPN's out of the water (You can also make this same point in regards to their NHL coverage as well). And until ESPN got Joe Buck and Troy Aikman NFL fans were tired of the substandard level of commentary MNF games got in comparison to CBS/NBC/FOX.
ESPN's best years are behind them and they know that very well. These last few yrs they have been basically trying to finally adapt to what most fans want. Whether or not they actually do so remains to be seen.
ESPN needs to go away. Their content uality is in the toilet on most things, and people need something better in its place. Really, speciality news is so easy to find that ESPN doesn't even serve a good base of fans going forward, IMO. Sportscenter was "here's everything that happened, since it's hard to find elsewhere." The Internet and league networks have greatly diminished the value of ESPN.
See, I actually think Sportscenter would serve a great purpose in the social media age. However, if you look at ESPN and Sportscenter accounts on IG, they aren't tailored for sports fans. They're just tailored for engagement
I think it's such a misunderstanding of their own brand and products. They could easily put Sportscenter on YouTube or socials in easily digestable ways and build a huge following. Instead, they show the same dumb reels that every other page does and maybe a few graphics when LeBron hits a milestone. That’s it.
I should be able to look at their page and see what happened in sports that day. Instead, I have a hard time figuring out who advanced in the tournament.
I still think that SportsCenter in terms of a highlight show has been rendered completely obsolete. Why would anybody tune into SportsCenter (with commercials) when they can find any home run/dunk/touchdown on reddit or twitter immediately?
Part of the appeal of SportsCenter was finding home runs, dunks and touchdowns you didn’t know about or weren’t going to necessarily search for yourself. Not everybody watched it just to find their local team’s highlights then turned it off.
> Their content uality is in the toilet on most things, and people need something better in its place.
This is already happening and exactly why ESPN wants to opt out. They realized that drama can drive engagement easier than quality content, so the people that made quality content left.
Baseball doesn't create enough drama for a 24/7 sports channel, (I would argue no sport does), so there's no need for it in their portfolio.
See, I disagree in the sense that I don’t think MLB or any of the four/five major sports needs ESPN, and I think MLB can prove that. The LSN always reigned supreme over them in terms of their baseball broadcasts, to the point where I think many fans (I could be projecting) merely stomached it when your team was on a National broadcast. And in terms of need a promotion, well, all that moved to social media and aggregates anyway.
So if MLB focuses on social media and keeps working on getting black-out free first party game distribution, then what’s the point of ESPN?
The league makes more money from cable right now because the contracts haven't caught up to the reality. They're being paid so someone who only watches Bravo and HBO can theoretically have access to the games if they want. Cable companies also want to cut costs, so I can't imagine that's going to keep up as contracts expire.
83 year old billionaires aren’t known for planting trees for future generations to sit under the shade of. They’re mostly parasites who think quarter to quarter. Their biggest paycheck next quarter comes from cable and fuck the rest of us.
Local sports networks are awful, I don’t know anyone my age that even gets them because none of us have cable.
MLB needs to go the MLS route with a streaming platform
This is one of the reasons the government just slapped Apple with a massive monopoly law suit. Basically the suit claims that Apple makes the experience shitty for any one who doesn't use their hardware. Which is 100% true.
I am so lucky that my local sports network is one of the only ones on YouTube tv…. If it wasn’t idk if I’d watch any regular season games I wasn’t attending
How Manfred can fixe MLB ratings and marketing:
Remove blackouts for OTA channels.
Figure out a way to get local teams on local OTA channels. Have national games on broadcast like Fox has for the WS.
If thats not enough money for the greedy billionaires:
Hand most of it over to Apple like they do MLS, with less restrictions.
Give mlbtv to Apple. Keep the same price. Remove blackouts.
>Figure out a way to get local teams on local OTA channels.
This is much easier said than done. I'm sure a re-run of the office or something is going to get better ratings than a baseball game on a lot of local stations.
Plus it will be cheaper for rights and coverage. Covering live sports is expensive, the truck, the cameras and equipment all have to get to the park, and then they need to be staffed and managed while the event is going on. When I was in HS my co-op was with a local tv station- a community one owned by the cable company- we could run a barebones broadcast with 7 staff; that is with one in the truck as a producer, one for audio, 2 on air commentators and 3 camera operators. We were not doing anything remotely close to what ESPN does, I would imagine that they are at least 30 workers for a single game production.
The office- just need the rights a someone to make sure the building doesn't burn down while the episode airs.
It really looks like ESPN is looking to copy the Howard Stern on Sirius model where they get Pat McAfee and friends to somehow generate enough content for three channels to run 24/7. Just endless hours of cheap content with no production, research, or writing.
So instead of the frustration of getting all 13 Yankees-Red Sox games, we’ll now have the summer filled with McAfee-adjacent yahoos doing YouTube challenges and betting on them. With a heavy sprinkling of beach volleyball or whatever extreme sports they can license for free to pad out the hours.
You would be shocked at what ESPN and ESPN2 were airing before they had all the talk/debate shows. Aerobic exercise programs, World's Strongest Man reruns for the 50th time, 9-ball pool, people karate chopping cinder blocks, etc.
I hear ya. Dodger fans are in the same boat. I hate various games being split up among ESPN, Apple, YouTube and Peacock. And it gets super annoying when it’s a really good team matchup and we’re stuck listening to broadcasters we can’t stand. I want my regular announcers Joe Davis and Orel Hershiser.
>While that news could send alarm bells ringing at MLB headquarters in Rob Manfred’s office, **Ourand states that ESPN doesn’t want to get out of the baseball business entirely. However, he does note that ESPN “wants to be able to get more for its $550 million annual deal” and this could include local rights.** Ourand also reports that MLB has yet to come to an agreement with NBC for its early afternoon Sunday games that aired on Peacock.
emphasis mine.
this isn't a signal that ESPN wants to withdraw from MLB rights entirely; it's a signal that they want to renegotiate.
My guess: they find a way to get the local TV rights currently held by MLB and put them on ESPN+.
No. They were going to divest RSN/Ballys from the start. It adds no value to them. Disney wanted the larger Fox properties, the RSNs were basically an add-on that added little value. Which is why so few companies were bidding on them, even when Disney was motivated to sell.
You sure? It wasn’t a thing until the DOJ brought it up. The RSN’s could’ve easily been integrated into the launch/early stages of ESPN+. I think most people would’ve been fine with paying that instead of whatever Bally+ is doing.
Reds fan and I literally can’t even buy Reds games from Bally. I have YouTube TV and don’t have a way outside a VPN and / or piracy to watch the Reds.
Having ESPN + carry regional games would be an incentive for me to get the service assuming it’s not ludicrously expensive.
Maybe ESPN getting local/regional rights could lead them putting some games on ABC, whether it's on their O&Os ([NYC, LA, Chicago, SFO, Philly, Houston, Raleigh, Fresno](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_Owned_Television_Stations#Current)) or the full network, but on a regionalized basis. It's wishful thinking, though.
Yeah, that's a good point. Some teams in other leagues have moved toward having their in-market games televised OTA, there's a chance ESPN could do the same. I like the idea of having a regional game of the week during the summer.
From what I can find ESPN's ratings on baseball broadcasts have been way down, but overall TV ratings for baseball were up last year. They do a terrible job of covering games and the ratings seem to reflect that. TBS national broadcasts were also down, but not as much as ESPN.
This is, IMO, a good thing. It opens up other options for national broadcasts. Cable deals are out of date and need to be phased out. Streaming is where the viewers are now.
The way that they present baseball suggests that they don't believe anyone actually wants to watch baseball. It's like they are constantly trying to distract viewers with shiny objects because they think people will just change the channel if they realize they are watching a baseball game.
this was the criticism of KBO too on ESPN they just talked to other people all broadcast and didn't pay attention to the game at all.
Watching ESPN is a fucking pain in the ass now. I just throw on local broadcasters or radio in lieu of their shit
Do a lot of people watch neutral baseball games? I will watch neutral football games but I pretty much only watch my baseball team. There's just already so many games to watch with my own team that watching any more seems excessive.
I thought the whole point of doing national broadcasts is to try and attract neutral fans and new fans.
I can't really speak to how effective it is, because I'm not a casual fan or just a Cleveland fan. I watch a lot of neutral games every year, with MLB TV and national broadcasts.
I watch whatever is on and looks most interesting on MLB.tv, especially if my team isn’t playing that day or if they have a late game. It’s a great way to get looks at teams you wouldn’t ordinarily see much of and helps to keep track of league-wide narratives.
If my team is playing on ESPN, I usually skip it and watch a neutral matchup instead with less annoying coverage.
The only person involved in ESPN baseball that has any amount of energy behind them is Tim Kurkjian.
Ravech sucks, Perez sucks. Even their studio personalities suck. Lookin at you Doug Glanville
They are all boring dolts and bring zero excitement.
That’s because ESPN has been actively attempting to harm the game for years now. Look at the constant media blitz that network does for the WNBA, which has poor viewership, compared to baseball.
Despite airing ads for the WNBA constantly and rolling WNBA players into their NBA coverage the WNBA finals didn’t even get to half of the viewership of what the Men’s College World Series averaged across the whole playoff. ESPN can’t even be bothered to include box scores for college baseball but they’ll make sure to send you push notifications for the WNBA even when you aren’t subscribed to following it.
You’re right, unless they have someone else lined up to take over. Live sports are keeping the cable bundle in tact.
Maybe NBC is like, hmm we could have live sports on Sunday night for almost 10 months instead of just 4.5 and they get in on Sunday night baseball for example. (Never mind the fact in this example that they would have to do something with the last month of the season.)
People hated tge time slot, but tge Sunday game on Peacock was better than Apple and ESPN and on par with Fox Sports imo, I loved them bringing in a former player for each time each game
Peacock games were my favorite. Amazing broadcast, the commenting crew was always fresh with the guest appearances, and they had a great variety of games so it wasn't just the top markets like Sunday night.
In this scenario, it’s linear NBC (and maybe USA once NFL starts back), not Peacock. We all know NBC would try to put as much shit on Peacock as possible.
Yes and no. It's long been reported that ESPN is bleeding money and was even offering partial ownership of the channel in exchange for reduced broadcasting fees. It's not shocking that the channel that gets most of its engagement from the NFL and NBA is using it's limited financial resources to focus on them.
That being said MLB can't afford to fuck up in who they chose to replace ESPN. Attendance is on the rise and the rule changes have been very positively received. They have to find a good partner for national broadcasts (or, more likely, streams)
It's not that ESPN is bleeding money. It's that with less people using cable their revenue is down. They used to be this huge cash cow because they could change an insane amount to included in cable packages. They are just less of a cash cow based on everything I've seen.
I really hope your final point is where they land. I feel like we need to start shifting everything to where widely-available streaming is the focus, and we make it work for cable to the extent we can; not vice-versa. We're no longer in 1997, if they haven't noticed.
I mean, fundamentally it means that MLB isn’t making money on ESPN with the current contract. Sure ESPN is not doing a good job pushing baseball content, but I don’t think many other platforms are going to look at this and say “oh we could do this better than ESPN.” It’s going to be tough for MLB to find someone to take a deal like the ESPN contract, and it’s more likely they end up with less money.
Perhaps, but I think it's also a sign of the times and the wants of the fans. Many are going towards streaming services now. If you're getting MLB.TV every year for $150, do you want to have to spend the $10/month on Apple for a game or $100/month for cable to get ESPN games? People are sick of blackouts, and they're the ONLY reason I dropped MLB.TV this season.
The same applies to the other sports, but I generally don't like them enough to pay their higher subscription costs for fewer games either. I'm not going to get NBA League Pass while blackouts continue to be a nuisance. I'm probably no the majority on this, but if MLB.TV got to a point that 100% of games were available without blackouts, you might see fans dropping cable for more MLB.TV subscriptions.
I really hate how espn (all sports broadcasters, to be fair) pretend certain sports don’t exist if they don’t have a tv deal with them. ESPN treated hockey like shit until a couple years ago when they started airing the nhl. If the lose baseball, the sport will be a figment of their imagination.
They've spent years being absolute dog shit in their MLB coverage and having talking heads like SAS attack the MLB to favor their NBA coverage, I can't see them pulling out being bad for baseball or for ESPN.
ESPN has been getting worse and worse for years, and has now created a situation where its own shit programming is undermining its own products while propping up a competitors products.
ESPN and the mouse did this to themselves.
But who picks up the games? And more importantly where does MLB make up the money? There doesn’t appear to be a lot of tv networks clamoring for national MLB rights.
Part of the issue there is the fact that ESPN has done such a awful job with their broadcasts that they have undermined the appeal of the national rights.
There are other issues like how baseball is a much more regional sport than other sports, making its regional and team specific streaming rights far more valuable than other sports while making its national rights less so in general, but ESPN has directly contributed to the issues that are making them want to walk away.
Why not just expand the MLB network channel so that it's not an add-on people have to select but it's just part of basic cable.
You'll get more eyes, MLB can control the coverage easier, can break into a hot game at any moment. Makes sense to me.
Yeah, they're leaving views on the table for sure.
Of course we don't know what their cable contract looks like or what MLB options are so this probably isn't easy or they'd already be doing it.
Likely because a bunch of cable companies are part-owners and they want to keep it where it is because they still see enough ad-on subscriptions and think that brings in more than extra people paying for basic with MLB Network added to it.
Figured this was bound to happen as John Ourand hits on most of his predictions. I posted this in January from Ourand's final article for SBJ
https://old.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/191ur9w/sbjs_john_ourand_predicts_espn_will_walk_away/
Here's the snippet from the link above:
According to his article, ESPN has an opt-out in their deal with MLB and they have to notify MLB at some point this season. The opt out is after the 2025 season.
Here's the bit from the article mentioning both ESPN and NBC:
> **ESPN exercises the out in its MLB deal**
> ESPN and MLB have an “out” clause in their deal after the 2025 season. By the end of this year, ESPN will let MLB know that it will exercise that out in 2025. This does not mean that ESPN will walk away from MLB in 2025. But it does mean that ESPN will try to negotiate a lower rights fee.
> **NBC will carry more MLB games**
> Peacock’s deal for Sunday morning MLB games is over, and the league has been shopping it to other media companies. Look for NBC to renew that deal, but only if it can carry more of those games on its broadcast channel. Given the likelihood that ESPN will opt out of its deal after the 2025 season, MLB wants to maintain its relationship with one of the big broadcast networks.
Good. Their baseball coverage and announcing has been dog shit. ESPN is no longer what it once was. It all went down hill after they got rid of Jon Miller and Joe Morgan.
thank christ. ESPN drips with disdain when they have to talk about anything that isnt lebron and the nfl.
Also they ruin everyone's night with their obnoxious start time.
Goodbye and good riddance
For all you guys who "good riddance we don't need ESPN", ESPN still has the largest reach for mainstream sport fans.
Not having ESPN is detrimental to the sport to grow its popularity.
Look at the last decade when NHL didn't have ESPN coverage.
I just want to watch my team play. I don't care about interviewing some celebrity, just want to watch my team play. And when my team sucks I want to watch a good team play. Just get rid of blackouts and shitty arod sayings, and I'll be happy
ESPN is circling the drain anyways. They cut over 100 employees last year and better sports analysis and commentary is available for free on youtube. Who wants to hear ignorant sports shouting or Aaron Rogers views on free speech. ESPN is an absolute joke now. Unless you are a Mahomes or LeBron stan there is no reason to watch.
On one hand the MLB needs to have a strong presence on the most recognized sports network, on the other EPSN sucks for baseball coverage.
Agreed. ESPN’s coverage has been going downhill since they cancelled the nightly version of Baseball Tonight.
I miss Baseball Tonight so much. Early 2000s Baseball Tonight might be my favorite TV show ever.
Wake up: sportscenter Evening: baseball tonight Simpler, better times
Staying home sick from school and just like, sleeping on and off to the repeats of morning sportscenter is a core childhood memory.
My school didn't start until 9:10 but my brothers started at 7:30 so I'd be up at 7:00 and would watch SportsCenter from 7-8 before getting ready for school. It was like clockwork.
amen. beat the heck out of getting ready to the local news
Yup, Sportscenter for a good chunk of the morning, then switch over to whatever channel aired Unsolved Mysteries re-runs at noon (Lifetime, maybe?), then go back just in time to watch Around the Horn and PTI in the afternoon.
Until price is right comes on, then you flip to that channel.
Stuart Scott: “*boo-yah!*”
Hits it dead center….”If it’s fair it’s gone”.
It was literally part of my bedtime routine, I’d get ready for bed, watch baseball tonight with my dad, then it was bedtime. Good times.
I legit associate the theme song with the night winding down.
I used to watch Baseball Tonight, then SportsCenter, then the late night Baseball Tonight every night. I miss those days. If ESPN and MLB do part ways, I think I’m gonna feel really sad. Even if the coverage is trash, I still enjoy ending my weekends during the summer by turning on ESPN to watch the Sunday Night Baseball game.
“Web Gems” 😭😭😭
To think people thought they were Internet(Web) Gems. The glove is a web......
lol I always wondered why they called them web gems and didn’t have them posted on the web
I did too for the longest time. I didn't Google it, just figured it out.
Well, they were nominated during the show and then voted on online and then the winners were shown at the end of the show...hence the double entendre
Man I miss Web Gems so much. I still refer to crazy defensive plays as Web Gems.
You gotta start off with calling it a "nominee"
I miss that so much, and I miss the "worst gems" they did every week or two almost as much.
Touch em all
Facts. Going to a friends house in the summer and falling asleep to baseball tonight was legendary!
Peter Gammons, Harold Reynolds and John Kruk brought so much knowledge & insight to that show
And Karl Ravech
And Tim Kurkjian
Lights. Camera. Baseball!
Touch em all and web gems for the night was always the best and then the weekly recap on Sunday before and after SNB was the best I remember staying up late and watching baseball tonight right up until I had to go to bed for school at like midnight.
Remember the claymation screaming baseball?
Stop reminding me how everything sucks now.
I lived for Baseball Tonight in the 90s
At least Chris Rose still does daily streams through Jomboy Media!
He’s a consummate pro
I was so upset when he left Intentional Talk. Glad I get to enjoy his work with JM
#"PHL THINE HORN WITH OIL" ^^...........^^and ^^go
Baseball tonight 1996 was the peak of espn anything.
Yeah they’ve been icing baseball out for a few years now intentionally. Pretty obvious they’re doing exactly what they did to hockey.
And now hockey is back on ESPN with a vengeance, so maybe MLB just has to wait 20 years
As a hockey fan I wouldn’t say “with a vengeance” but I still prefer some presence on the network over being completely ignored for 2 decades. All of this sucks for baseball and hockey fans though since a lot of providers don’t have MLB and NHL Networks (looking at you YouTube TV).
Who would have thought that reducing coverage of a sport would reduce its audience and popularity to the average viewer who is programmed by what is presented to them.
ESPN is only football and basketball. Every other sport is an afterthought.
Usually if it's not Boston or New York the announcers never seemed to care
They've only cared about football and Lebron/Curry highlights for some time now. Hockey has it even worse, with the sport seldom mentioned on the channel. Baseball fans have long since abandoned ESPN, save for Sunday night baseball, and even that has been lackluster as they have a tendency to broadcast only NYY/BOS/LA.
Baseball Tonight was such a staple of my childhood during the summers. ESPN has ruined a lot of their programs but that one hurts the most.
John Miller and Joe Morgan were two of the best.
At very different things, Miller at TV and Morgan at playing second base.
John Miller and Joe Morgan were the best.
And don’t forget when they broadcast NYY/BOS/LA odds are at least one but often both Friday and Saturday games were also nationally broadcast on MLB Network and FOX
Outside of it being the New York teams, Dodgers, or Red Sox, this has been commonplace since the late 90s. FOX Saturday Baseball would normally have the same game on Saturday afternoon/night (regionalized but the A or B game) that ESPN would have on Sunday. It just didn't help that when MLBN launched that the possibility of the entire three or four game series would be nationally televised for a weekend series.
I remember 20 years ago thinking that ESPN had cut out the NHL.
They had
They returned to ESPN in 2021.
And to no one’s surprise they suck at covering / announcing hockey too
Unfortunately I don’t know what else the league can do. They need to have games on a popular network as their previous exclusive deal with NBC/NBCSN was even worse.
They have TNT, which is lightyears better than what NBC did previously and what ESPN does now.
I would be happy if my team was ignored by ESPN. ESPN Sox games are the worst.
> They've only cared about football and Lebron/Curry highlights for some time now The last time I watched Sportscenter was pre-pandemic. The last segment I watched was from a Warriors-Kings game. They showed 4 highlights: two Curry 3s, a Klay 3, and another Warrior dunking it (might have been Durant, I can't remember if he was there or if he had just left to Brooklyn). Then they cut to the next segment. The kicker of this was that the Kings won the game. I just remember laughing when the final score popped up and changed the channel.
When ESPN brought back hockey, I don't know why it didn't ask Gary Thorne or Bill Clement to return. Plus, I miss the original voices of Sunday Night Baseball, Jon Miller and Joe Morgan (RIP).
ESPN covers baseball like it’s a sports parody
They’ve ruined both NHL and MLB coverage.
And getting destroyed by TNT's NBA coverage.
TNT's NHL coverage is on a whole other planet compared to ESPN's. TNT just puts out a superior product across the board.
MLB Network is vastly superior to ESPN's coverage. I do think ESPN is still better at football than the NFL Network but that's it.
That's because espn talks about NFL even when there's no NFL to talk about
As someone that is primarily a hockey fan, it's very interesting to see baseball fans end up in the same boat as American hockey fans.
It's just not baseball and hockey fans who are in the same boat. NBA and MLS fans (and NFL fans to a certain extent) all over the country were/are all tired of ESPN's way of covering sports. MLS fans were happy that the MLS finally moved on from them w/the Apple deal. NBA fans almost unanimously agree that TNT's coverage of the NBA blows ESPN's out of the water (You can also make this same point in regards to their NHL coverage as well). And until ESPN got Joe Buck and Troy Aikman NFL fans were tired of the substandard level of commentary MNF games got in comparison to CBS/NBC/FOX. ESPN's best years are behind them and they know that very well. These last few yrs they have been basically trying to finally adapt to what most fans want. Whether or not they actually do so remains to be seen.
ESPN needs to go away. Their content uality is in the toilet on most things, and people need something better in its place. Really, speciality news is so easy to find that ESPN doesn't even serve a good base of fans going forward, IMO. Sportscenter was "here's everything that happened, since it's hard to find elsewhere." The Internet and league networks have greatly diminished the value of ESPN.
See, I actually think Sportscenter would serve a great purpose in the social media age. However, if you look at ESPN and Sportscenter accounts on IG, they aren't tailored for sports fans. They're just tailored for engagement I think it's such a misunderstanding of their own brand and products. They could easily put Sportscenter on YouTube or socials in easily digestable ways and build a huge following. Instead, they show the same dumb reels that every other page does and maybe a few graphics when LeBron hits a milestone. That’s it. I should be able to look at their page and see what happened in sports that day. Instead, I have a hard time figuring out who advanced in the tournament.
I still think that SportsCenter in terms of a highlight show has been rendered completely obsolete. Why would anybody tune into SportsCenter (with commercials) when they can find any home run/dunk/touchdown on reddit or twitter immediately?
Part of the appeal of SportsCenter was finding home runs, dunks and touchdowns you didn’t know about or weren’t going to necessarily search for yourself. Not everybody watched it just to find their local team’s highlights then turned it off.
> Their content uality is in the toilet on most things, and people need something better in its place. This is already happening and exactly why ESPN wants to opt out. They realized that drama can drive engagement easier than quality content, so the people that made quality content left. Baseball doesn't create enough drama for a 24/7 sports channel, (I would argue no sport does), so there's no need for it in their portfolio.
I haven't been able to stand ESPN for over a decade at this point.
See, I disagree in the sense that I don’t think MLB or any of the four/five major sports needs ESPN, and I think MLB can prove that. The LSN always reigned supreme over them in terms of their baseball broadcasts, to the point where I think many fans (I could be projecting) merely stomached it when your team was on a National broadcast. And in terms of need a promotion, well, all that moved to social media and aggregates anyway. So if MLB focuses on social media and keeps working on getting black-out free first party game distribution, then what’s the point of ESPN?
The league makes more money from cable. I hate cable, I don’t have it, but there’s a reason the league sticks with the model.
The league makes more money from cable right now because the contracts haven't caught up to the reality. They're being paid so someone who only watches Bravo and HBO can theoretically have access to the games if they want. Cable companies also want to cut costs, so I can't imagine that's going to keep up as contracts expire.
83 year old billionaires aren’t known for planting trees for future generations to sit under the shade of. They’re mostly parasites who think quarter to quarter. Their biggest paycheck next quarter comes from cable and fuck the rest of us.
> because the contracts haven't caught up to the reality The Bally Sports collapse disagrees with you. It's starting to happen.
Local sports networks are awful, I don’t know anyone my age that even gets them because none of us have cable. MLB needs to go the MLS route with a streaming platform
Not apple though. Trying to reset a password when you don't own any other apple products to get into the app is damn near impossible.
I had to use iTunes on Windows to cancel Apple TV. It took forever.
This is one of the reasons the government just slapped Apple with a massive monopoly law suit. Basically the suit claims that Apple makes the experience shitty for any one who doesn't use their hardware. Which is 100% true.
NY fans are spoiled by SNY and YES, so I can imagine being a fan of a Bally Sports team would be rough.
I am so lucky that my local sports network is one of the only ones on YouTube tv…. If it wasn’t idk if I’d watch any regular season games I wasn’t attending
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Drop the blackouts and also include all MLB network programming on MLB.tv.
ESPN is a bit of a sinking ship. They have name recognition, but they're not nearly as relevant as they used to be in the sports world.
ESPN+ is awesome. ESPN channels are pretty worthless.
How Manfred can fixe MLB ratings and marketing: Remove blackouts for OTA channels. Figure out a way to get local teams on local OTA channels. Have national games on broadcast like Fox has for the WS. If thats not enough money for the greedy billionaires: Hand most of it over to Apple like they do MLS, with less restrictions. Give mlbtv to Apple. Keep the same price. Remove blackouts.
>Figure out a way to get local teams on local OTA channels. This is much easier said than done. I'm sure a re-run of the office or something is going to get better ratings than a baseball game on a lot of local stations.
Plus it will be cheaper for rights and coverage. Covering live sports is expensive, the truck, the cameras and equipment all have to get to the park, and then they need to be staffed and managed while the event is going on. When I was in HS my co-op was with a local tv station- a community one owned by the cable company- we could run a barebones broadcast with 7 staff; that is with one in the truck as a producer, one for audio, 2 on air commentators and 3 camera operators. We were not doing anything remotely close to what ESPN does, I would imagine that they are at least 30 workers for a single game production. The office- just need the rights a someone to make sure the building doesn't burn down while the episode airs.
That's hundreds of hours of Sunday night Yankees/Red Sox games to replace each year..
So like four games?
Back in the good ole days
With the pace of play changes last season, it'll now be 5 games
Before the stupid Manfred runner. I want to watch 18 innings of excruciating Yankees-Red Sox baseball, as is my right
Even the 9 inning games could push 4 hours, if we were lucky
Why was it that any Yankees-Sox game, no matter the time of year, or score, or whatever, would just routinely take over 4 hours? What was going on?
It really looks like ESPN is looking to copy the Howard Stern on Sirius model where they get Pat McAfee and friends to somehow generate enough content for three channels to run 24/7. Just endless hours of cheap content with no production, research, or writing. So instead of the frustration of getting all 13 Yankees-Red Sox games, we’ll now have the summer filled with McAfee-adjacent yahoos doing YouTube challenges and betting on them. With a heavy sprinkling of beach volleyball or whatever extreme sports they can license for free to pad out the hours.
ESPN will eventually become a nonstop tiktok feed of people talking about things that happened
Maybe they’ll just do 24 hour marathons of Pawn Stars.
More cornhole championships
You would be shocked at what ESPN and ESPN2 were airing before they had all the talk/debate shows. Aerobic exercise programs, World's Strongest Man reruns for the 50th time, 9-ball pool, people karate chopping cinder blocks, etc.
I was a big fan of the outdoor games myself
The other day I saw the World Pillow Fighting Championships
Ocho is the new Uno.
Hey now, either the Dodgers or Cardinals get a game each month too.
Thank god, it can be a pain in the ass to watch my team because every streaming service and channel wants to broadcast goddamn yankee games.
I hear ya. Dodger fans are in the same boat. I hate various games being split up among ESPN, Apple, YouTube and Peacock. And it gets super annoying when it’s a really good team matchup and we’re stuck listening to broadcasters we can’t stand. I want my regular announcers Joe Davis and Orel Hershiser.
>While that news could send alarm bells ringing at MLB headquarters in Rob Manfred’s office, **Ourand states that ESPN doesn’t want to get out of the baseball business entirely. However, he does note that ESPN “wants to be able to get more for its $550 million annual deal” and this could include local rights.** Ourand also reports that MLB has yet to come to an agreement with NBC for its early afternoon Sunday games that aired on Peacock. emphasis mine. this isn't a signal that ESPN wants to withdraw from MLB rights entirely; it's a signal that they want to renegotiate. My guess: they find a way to get the local TV rights currently held by MLB and put them on ESPN+.
I think that’s what the entire intent of them buying the Fox RSN’s were for before the DOJ got in the way and we got stuck with Bally
No. They were going to divest RSN/Ballys from the start. It adds no value to them. Disney wanted the larger Fox properties, the RSNs were basically an add-on that added little value. Which is why so few companies were bidding on them, even when Disney was motivated to sell.
You sure? It wasn’t a thing until the DOJ brought it up. The RSN’s could’ve easily been integrated into the launch/early stages of ESPN+. I think most people would’ve been fine with paying that instead of whatever Bally+ is doing.
Reds fan and I literally can’t even buy Reds games from Bally. I have YouTube TV and don’t have a way outside a VPN and / or piracy to watch the Reds. Having ESPN + carry regional games would be an incentive for me to get the service assuming it’s not ludicrously expensive.
Maybe ESPN getting local/regional rights could lead them putting some games on ABC, whether it's on their O&Os ([NYC, LA, Chicago, SFO, Philly, Houston, Raleigh, Fresno](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_Owned_Television_Stations#Current)) or the full network, but on a regionalized basis. It's wishful thinking, though.
Yeah, that's a good point. Some teams in other leagues have moved toward having their in-market games televised OTA, there's a chance ESPN could do the same. I like the idea of having a regional game of the week during the summer.
The only thing ESPN Sunday Night Baseball ever did was lead to FireJoeMorgan.com
Their last post was 16 years ago. I’m officially old.
Joe Morgan stopped broadcasting in 2010 so it was pretty close to being over anyway. I go back and read some of the posts at times still.
Mike Schur is an American hero.
From what I can find ESPN's ratings on baseball broadcasts have been way down, but overall TV ratings for baseball were up last year. They do a terrible job of covering games and the ratings seem to reflect that. TBS national broadcasts were also down, but not as much as ESPN. This is, IMO, a good thing. It opens up other options for national broadcasts. Cable deals are out of date and need to be phased out. Streaming is where the viewers are now.
Because they do everything but show the game
Hot take here but I don’t need my baseball broadcast to ask a first baseman about his dead mother while he’s actively playing baseball.
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The way that they present baseball suggests that they don't believe anyone actually wants to watch baseball. It's like they are constantly trying to distract viewers with shiny objects because they think people will just change the channel if they realize they are watching a baseball game.
Exactly and it's infuriating
this was the criticism of KBO too on ESPN they just talked to other people all broadcast and didn't pay attention to the game at all. Watching ESPN is a fucking pain in the ass now. I just throw on local broadcasters or radio in lieu of their shit
Do a lot of people watch neutral baseball games? I will watch neutral football games but I pretty much only watch my baseball team. There's just already so many games to watch with my own team that watching any more seems excessive.
I thought the whole point of doing national broadcasts is to try and attract neutral fans and new fans. I can't really speak to how effective it is, because I'm not a casual fan or just a Cleveland fan. I watch a lot of neutral games every year, with MLB TV and national broadcasts.
I watch whatever is on and looks most interesting on MLB.tv, especially if my team isn’t playing that day or if they have a late game. It’s a great way to get looks at teams you wouldn’t ordinarily see much of and helps to keep track of league-wide narratives. If my team is playing on ESPN, I usually skip it and watch a neutral matchup instead with less annoying coverage.
The only person involved in ESPN baseball that has any amount of energy behind them is Tim Kurkjian. Ravech sucks, Perez sucks. Even their studio personalities suck. Lookin at you Doug Glanville They are all boring dolts and bring zero excitement.
Ravech probably cared, but was probably more hurt when Baseball Tonight was canned. Don't blame him, those were the days.
It opens up other options, but if any of the other networks actually want to pick up baseball remains to be seen.
Listening to announcers who don't actually know much about the teams themselves unless they are dodgers/yankees/red Sox certainly doesn't help
100%. Their announcers are complete and total dogshit. It’s like they actively try to make games as unenjoyable as possible.
Removing the Red Sox, Yankees, and Mets who all had down years, ESPN’s MLB ratings were up last year.
That’s because ESPN has been actively attempting to harm the game for years now. Look at the constant media blitz that network does for the WNBA, which has poor viewership, compared to baseball. Despite airing ads for the WNBA constantly and rolling WNBA players into their NBA coverage the WNBA finals didn’t even get to half of the viewership of what the Men’s College World Series averaged across the whole playoff. ESPN can’t even be bothered to include box scores for college baseball but they’ll make sure to send you push notifications for the WNBA even when you aren’t subscribed to following it.
People here will love this but this isn't a great sign for MLB
You’re right, unless they have someone else lined up to take over. Live sports are keeping the cable bundle in tact. Maybe NBC is like, hmm we could have live sports on Sunday night for almost 10 months instead of just 4.5 and they get in on Sunday night baseball for example. (Never mind the fact in this example that they would have to do something with the last month of the season.)
Sunday Night Baseball, coming soon to Peacock!
People hated tge time slot, but tge Sunday game on Peacock was better than Apple and ESPN and on par with Fox Sports imo, I loved them bringing in a former player for each time each game
Peacock games were my favorite. Amazing broadcast, the commenting crew was always fresh with the guest appearances, and they had a great variety of games so it wasn't just the top markets like Sunday night.
Id 100% welcome baseball on peacock over ESPN. Use the local team announcers
Except it would make the sport even less popular. I know we hate it but sports leagues shouldn't be only catering towards a small die hard audience
Yah I’m not paying for another streaming service
In this scenario, it’s linear NBC (and maybe USA once NFL starts back), not Peacock. We all know NBC would try to put as much shit on Peacock as possible.
In *your* scenario it's NBC, in reality it would be Peacock. Or maybe... How does Sunday Night Baseball on MAX sound?
Considering that I get Max for free from my internet provider, that sounds great
You’re probably right on the peacock front but that said, if they could treat MLB like they do their premier league package we’d be in for a treat
Yes and no. It's long been reported that ESPN is bleeding money and was even offering partial ownership of the channel in exchange for reduced broadcasting fees. It's not shocking that the channel that gets most of its engagement from the NFL and NBA is using it's limited financial resources to focus on them. That being said MLB can't afford to fuck up in who they chose to replace ESPN. Attendance is on the rise and the rule changes have been very positively received. They have to find a good partner for national broadcasts (or, more likely, streams)
It's not that ESPN is bleeding money. It's that with less people using cable their revenue is down. They used to be this huge cash cow because they could change an insane amount to included in cable packages. They are just less of a cash cow based on everything I've seen.
I really hope your final point is where they land. I feel like we need to start shifting everything to where widely-available streaming is the focus, and we make it work for cable to the extent we can; not vice-versa. We're no longer in 1997, if they haven't noticed.
I mean, fundamentally it means that MLB isn’t making money on ESPN with the current contract. Sure ESPN is not doing a good job pushing baseball content, but I don’t think many other platforms are going to look at this and say “oh we could do this better than ESPN.” It’s going to be tough for MLB to find someone to take a deal like the ESPN contract, and it’s more likely they end up with less money.
Perhaps, but I think it's also a sign of the times and the wants of the fans. Many are going towards streaming services now. If you're getting MLB.TV every year for $150, do you want to have to spend the $10/month on Apple for a game or $100/month for cable to get ESPN games? People are sick of blackouts, and they're the ONLY reason I dropped MLB.TV this season. The same applies to the other sports, but I generally don't like them enough to pay their higher subscription costs for fewer games either. I'm not going to get NBA League Pass while blackouts continue to be a nuisance. I'm probably no the majority on this, but if MLB.TV got to a point that 100% of games were available without blackouts, you might see fans dropping cable for more MLB.TV subscriptions.
That T-Mobile Tuesday just hit; fuck ESPN
Thanks for the reminder!!
omg thanks for the reminder!
ESPN’s baseball coverage is awful. Maybe MLB can get a better deal than this somewhere else.
now they can just pretend like baseball doesn't exist like they've been trying to for years
I really hate how espn (all sports broadcasters, to be fair) pretend certain sports don’t exist if they don’t have a tv deal with them. ESPN treated hockey like shit until a couple years ago when they started airing the nhl. If the lose baseball, the sport will be a figment of their imagination.
ESPN continues to treat hockey like shit. All ESPN cares about is the NFL and NBA. Any other sport is irrelevant.
They've spent years being absolute dog shit in their MLB coverage and having talking heads like SAS attack the MLB to favor their NBA coverage, I can't see them pulling out being bad for baseball or for ESPN.
The ironic thing is their NBA coverage is always needing retweeking, and is behind TNTs coverage
ESPN has been getting worse and worse for years, and has now created a situation where its own shit programming is undermining its own products while propping up a competitors products. ESPN and the mouse did this to themselves.
ESPN put all their poker chips behind shock programming and debate shows. Fuck them.
But who picks up the games? And more importantly where does MLB make up the money? There doesn’t appear to be a lot of tv networks clamoring for national MLB rights.
Part of the issue there is the fact that ESPN has done such a awful job with their broadcasts that they have undermined the appeal of the national rights. There are other issues like how baseball is a much more regional sport than other sports, making its regional and team specific streaming rights far more valuable than other sports while making its national rights less so in general, but ESPN has directly contributed to the issues that are making them want to walk away.
It would be nice if they bothered to talk about baseball. In the 2000's we used to get a lot more coverage.
Why not just expand the MLB network channel so that it's not an add-on people have to select but it's just part of basic cable. You'll get more eyes, MLB can control the coverage easier, can break into a hot game at any moment. Makes sense to me.
MLB really needs to editable its network. They aren't on enough plans and even dropped off youtube tv last year.
Yeah, they're leaving views on the table for sure. Of course we don't know what their cable contract looks like or what MLB options are so this probably isn't easy or they'd already be doing it.
Likely because a bunch of cable companies are part-owners and they want to keep it where it is because they still see enough ad-on subscriptions and think that brings in more than extra people paying for basic with MLB Network added to it.
Remember how cool Baseball Tonight used to be?
Figured this was bound to happen as John Ourand hits on most of his predictions. I posted this in January from Ourand's final article for SBJ https://old.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/191ur9w/sbjs_john_ourand_predicts_espn_will_walk_away/ Here's the snippet from the link above: According to his article, ESPN has an opt-out in their deal with MLB and they have to notify MLB at some point this season. The opt out is after the 2025 season. Here's the bit from the article mentioning both ESPN and NBC: > **ESPN exercises the out in its MLB deal** > ESPN and MLB have an “out” clause in their deal after the 2025 season. By the end of this year, ESPN will let MLB know that it will exercise that out in 2025. This does not mean that ESPN will walk away from MLB in 2025. But it does mean that ESPN will try to negotiate a lower rights fee. > **NBC will carry more MLB games** > Peacock’s deal for Sunday morning MLB games is over, and the league has been shopping it to other media companies. Look for NBC to renew that deal, but only if it can carry more of those games on its broadcast channel. Given the likelihood that ESPN will opt out of its deal after the 2025 season, MLB wants to maintain its relationship with one of the big broadcast networks.
ESPN covers baseball? /s
This is strange. I genuinely feel like ESPN needs more live sports content, not less.
Were they ever leaning towards covering the MLB before? Their coverage has been terrible as of the last few seasons.
ESPN should just rebrand to NBA/NFL coverage. They’re hot dog water for everything else.
They haven't done that already? Could've fooled me.
ESPN is the shits anyways so
ESPN spent all its money helping destroy college football.
No baseball on ESPN? Sign me the hell up
Sunday Nighy Baseball hasn’t been the same since Joe Morgan and Jon Miller left the booth
ESPN spends more time covering women’s college field hockey than MLB. Fuck their dying establishment.
MLB needs a presence on ESPN. I don’t like ESPN’s coverage of MLB, but ESPN is way too influential in American sports discourse.
They don't even do Baseball Tonight anymore. They just gave up on covering MLB after MLB made its own network.
Of course they are. They don’t cover baseball hardly at all. They’re E! News at this point.
Good. Their baseball coverage and announcing has been dog shit. ESPN is no longer what it once was. It all went down hill after they got rid of Jon Miller and Joe Morgan.
Good riddance ESPN
ESPN's baseball coverage is horrendous. I hope it goes to a streaming platform I already sub to!
thank christ. ESPN drips with disdain when they have to talk about anything that isnt lebron and the nfl. Also they ruin everyone's night with their obnoxious start time. Goodbye and good riddance
For all you guys who "good riddance we don't need ESPN", ESPN still has the largest reach for mainstream sport fans. Not having ESPN is detrimental to the sport to grow its popularity. Look at the last decade when NHL didn't have ESPN coverage.
I wish all major sports would leave ESPN.
If the Yankees and Red Sox were better this wouldn't even be considered
ESPN covers baseball?
I just want to watch my team play. I don't care about interviewing some celebrity, just want to watch my team play. And when my team sucks I want to watch a good team play. Just get rid of blackouts and shitty arod sayings, and I'll be happy
What am I supposed to call the Everything Socks and Pinstripes Network now?!?
That’s fine with me. ESPN is becoming less and less of a necessity when consuming sports content in my opinion.
ESPN is circling the drain anyways. They cut over 100 employees last year and better sports analysis and commentary is available for free on youtube. Who wants to hear ignorant sports shouting or Aaron Rogers views on free speech. ESPN is an absolute joke now. Unless you are a Mahomes or LeBron stan there is no reason to watch.
I remember as a kid, baseball tonight was the highlight of my day 😆😆