Elimination Day: MLB’s Dramatic Wild-Card Tripleheader Hits ESPN

Major League Baseball has three wild-card elimination games Thursday, providing exactly the type of early-round playoff drama that previously eluded the league and ESPN, and helped inform the network’s decision in February to opt out of its baseball rights deal. 

The full day of deciding games began with the Tigers and Guardians at 3:08 p.m. ET on sister Disney network ABC, followed by the Padres and Cubs at 5:08 p.m. ET on ESPN, and then the Red Sox and Yankees in prime time, also on ESPN, and providing another high-stakes chapter to one of the greatest rivalries in sports. 

That trio of wild-card Game 3s in just one day surpasses the two such contests that happened between 2022 and 2024, the first three seasons of MLB’s expanded playoff format. ESPN otherwise aired 10 wild-card sweeps, and the minimal drama in those series was part of the acrimonious decision in February to opt out of the final three years of its rights agreement with the league. 

That development happened even as last year’s wild-card series averaged 2.8 million viewers, up 25% from 2023, and was the most-watched first round since the creation of the new postseason format. 

“Unfortunately, in recent years, we have seen ESPN scale back their baseball coverage and investment in a way that is not consistent with the sport’s appeal or performance,” the league said in February upon the initial split with the network. 

More than seven months after that separation, much of the tension has either been forgotten or mooted. The two parties have an agreement in principle on a substantially reworked rights package focused more on local rights and the MLB.TV out-of-market game package. Beginning next year, NBC will pick up the wild-card rights, part of that network’s large-scale return to a sport it has aired on and off since 1939. 

ESPN, meanwhile, enjoyed a 21% audience bump in its regular-season MLB coverage in 2025, part of a much larger run of viewership growth in baseball, and more such boosts are expected when initial wild-card ratings are released later this week.

“There was a mutuality of interest in staying partners,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said about ESPN last month at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit. “It took the parties a little while to think creatively about how we could do that and meet goals that were not exactly aligned. But [ESPN chair] Jimmy [Pitaro] and I had a conversation in Sun Valley, and it kind of went from there.”

L.A. Sweep

The outlier to this year’s run of wild-card elimination games is the Dodgers, who completed a two-game sweep of the Reds on Wednesday. The defending league champions, also fielding the league’s largest payroll by far at $416.9 million, could be regaining some on-field strength after a more uneven season that didn’t see Los Angeles clinch the National League West division until game 159 of the regular season. The Dodgers will now face the Phillies in the divisional series beginning Saturday.

“Getting through [this] the way we have, kind of seamlessly getting to the next series, I think we’re in a good spot,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts.