The Orioles under new owner David Rubenstein have finally made a major statement in the market.

Pete Alonso will head to Baltimore on a five-year, $155 million deal, according to multiple reports, accelerating Major League Baseball’s hot stove.

The agreement brings the slugger to Baltimore after a seven-year run with the Mets, one that had been marked by a difficult contract negotiation last offseason that ended in a two-year, $54 million pact to stay with the team. The deal, however, included an opt-out after the 2025 season—one that Alonso exercised to return to the free-agent market.

Alonso, represented by baseball mega-agent Scott Boras, ultimately gained and used that opt-out as a means to bet on himself—and he responded this year with 38 home runs and a league-leading 41 doubles.

Rubenstein, a billionaire private-equity executive and co-chair of Carlyle, had initially arrived as Orioles owner early last year to great fanfare and expectation that the extended losing and lower spending under previous owner Peter Angelos would end.

The ensuing two seasons, however, had been marked with significant disappointment as Baltimore was swept in the opening round of the 2024 playoffs, and then it sank to the bottom of the American League East division this year with a 75–87 record.

Additionally, the rest of the division is quickly strengthening around the Orioles, as the defending AL champion Blue Jays are now a power under owner Rogers Communications, the Yankees and Red Sox are retooling, and the Rays have greater hope under new owner Patrick Zalupski.

What happens to the Orioles and their player spending amid these rising competitive pressures has been a growing question in Baltimore. Rubenstein is now emphatically answering that, with the second-largest deal in franchise history. The pact trails only one worth $161 million with Chris Davis that was signed in 2016 under Angelos, who later died in March 2024.

Alonso is a five-time All-Star who had been a cornerstone of the Mets’ offense. His departure marks an increasingly glum offseason for that club and its owner, Steve Cohen. Earlier this week, closer Edwin Díaz left in a free-agent deal with the Dodgers worth $69 million over three years.

The $155 million in Alonso’s contract just beats the $150 million pact, also over five years, that Kyle Schwarber just signed to stay with the Phillies. 

The National Football League’s aggressive international plans for 2026 and beyond continue to move into greater focus.

The league said Wednesday that it has completed a pact to play regular-season games in 2026 and 2028 in Munich at Allianz Arena, the home of the Bundesliga power FC Bayern Munich. The NFL was already set to play during those seasons in Germany, pairing with planned returns to Berlin in 2027 and 2029 after a game there last month. 

Reaching the pact for Munich, however, will bring the NFL back to where it played in 2022 and 2024, and where the league really began to make fan-development inroads in Germany. Now, the league counts the country as one of its top international markets.

Eleven of 32 teams have rights to Germany in the NFL’s Global Markets Program, a figure higher than any other country. The NFL claims to have more than 20 million fans in Germany, representing one of its top international markets, both in raw fan count and penetration relative to population. Several individual NFL teams also have marketing relationships with Bundesliga clubs, with the pacts looking to further leverage the crossover between football and soccer fandom. 

“Germany is of huge strategic importance for the NFL in Europe, and our return to Munich signals the league’s long-term commitment to playing games in the market,” said NFL DACH general manager Alexander Steinforth. 

Broader Template

The NFL, meanwhile, continues to shape what will be an unprecedented level of international play in 2026. The already-confirmed set of five games for next season now includes:

• One in Melbourne, Australia, with the Rams as the designated home team
• One in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Two in London at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
• One in Munich

More will be added to that list as a series of other new and returning international markets for the NFL are also under active consideration, including Mexico, Spain, Ireland, France, and Saudi Arabia. The final tally of the league’s global games in 2026 will pass the seven played this year, as the league potentially moves toward a full-season slate of such contests.

“We’ve laid out a dozen or 13 priority markets, and we’re starting to do the due diligence,” said NFL EVP Peter O’Reilly during the league’s fall meeting.

One of the largest U.S. pay-TV distributors is getting into skinny bundles.

YouTube TV said Wednesday that it will offer more than 10 genre-specific programming packages, beginning early next year. Foremost among those planned bundles is a YouTube TV Sports Plan with ESPN networks, including the ESPN Unlimited direct-to-consumer service, as well as FS1, and the revived NBC Sports Network, among others.

The service’s sports-oriented skinny bundle—something long discussed and much-anticipated within the television business—became fully possible after a Google-owned YouTube TV reached a new carriage agreement with ESPN parent company Disney last month. That pact, integrating the ESPN DTC offering into YouTube TV, arrived after a difficult, 15-day channel blackout, and followed another critical distribution deal in August with Fox and one with NBCUniversal in October.

Pricing details have not been finalized, but the YouTube TV Sports Plan will likely land between the unbundled $29.99 per month price for ESPN Unlimited and the $82.99 per month base price for the full YouTube TV service. Additional services such as NFL Sunday Ticket and RedZone will also be offered as add-on options to the YouTube TV Sports Plan. 

“TV should be easy, giving viewers greater control over what they want to watch,” wrote YouTube VP and head of subscriptions Christian Oestlien in a company blog post. “Our goal is to let you tailor your subscriptions with more options.”

Race to Get Skinny

YouTube TV is hardly alone in embracing the skinny bundle trend. Elsewhere in the television business, major carriers such as Spectrum, Comcast, DirecTV, and Disney-controlled Fubo have introduced their own competing packages over the past two years. ESPN and Fox, meanwhile, are also selling their respective streaming services in a new, sports-focused bundle.

Beyond more tailored programming choices for sports fans, many of these services also offer a series of enhanced features, including multiview capabilities, statistics integration, fantasy sports-related content, and capabilities for users to quickly find their favorite teams. The YouTube TV offering will run along those same lines. 

Ironically, YouTube TV itself began in 2017 as a skinny bundle, offering about 40 channels and positioning itself as a slimmed-down and more affordable option to traditional cable and satellite TV. In the ensuing years, YouTube TV has grown into a full-service platform with about 10 million subscribers and offering access to more than 100 channels, and it now aims to pass Spectrum, Comcast, and DirecTV to become the country’s largest pay-TV carrier.