NEW YORK — After many months of anticipation, Major League Baseball has formally unveiled a set of short-term national media-rights deals to repackage programming forfeited by ESPN, as well as some content previously held by Roku.
Roughly three months after reaching agreements in principle, the league said Wednesday it has finalized new pacts with NBCUniversal and Netflix, and it reached a substantially reworked deal with ESPN. Among the specific pacts, each covering the 2026–28 seasons:
- NBC Sports: A showpiece of this pact is the Comcast-owned outlet picking up Sunday night primetime rights and ending a 35-year run of Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN. There, NBC Sports will have a year-round showcase of live sports on the critical television night when also including existing pacts with the NFL and NBA. NBC Sports also picks up exclusive rights to the wild-card playoff round, which posted record viewership last month, as well as Sunday morning rights previously held by Roku, the first hour of the MLB draft, the MLB All-Star Futures Game, and select special-event games. When there are conflicts on Sunday nights with the other leagues, the MLB programming will air only on Peacock. That streaming service will also air one out-of-market MLB game every day of the season. The agreement is worth nearly $600 million over three years, Front Office Sports sources said.
- Netflix: The dominant streamer gains rights to an opening-night game, which in 2026 will be the Yankees at the Giants, as well as the Home Run Derby, the 2026 Field of Dreams game involving the Twins and Phillies, and a special-event game in each of the subsequent two years. The agreement is worth an estimated $50 million per year, according to FOS sources, and builds upon a separate pact for rights in Japan to the 2026 World Baseball Classic.
- ESPN: The substantially restructured agreement with the Disney-owned outlet calls for a 30-game national package that will air on ESPN’s linear networks, as well as the new ESPN direct-to-consumer service. ESPN retains rights to the MLB Little League Classic, and it gains rights to sell and distribute, through the ESPN app, local streaming rights to teams whose games are being produced and distributed by the league. The pact also gives ESPN rights to sell and distribute the MLB.TV out-of-market streaming service. The ESPN agreement, previously worth $550 million per year, is worth roughly the same figure in this new form, FOS sources confirmed.
All told, MLB was able to surpass what ESPN was previously paying alone while also incorporating a pair of new partners. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred confirmed at the Front Office Sports Tuned In summit in September that such an outcome was happening.
To do so, however, required folding the MLB.TV rights into the ESPN pact, as well as the access to local rights for the Diamondbacks, Guardians, Padres, Rockies, Twins, and most recently, the Mariners. Striking the new agreements also involved a period of initial acrimony between MLB and ESPN.
The new deals, however, also arrive amid a rising tide of MLB viewership, with the league posting audience gains during the regular season and then every individual round of the postseason.
“We think the combination of ESPN, NBCUniversal, and Netflix is a great win for us,” Manfred said Wednesday about the deals in the midst of MLB owners’ meetings here. “This expands our reach, increases our partnership revenue, and given the [ESPN] opt-out before, it was really important to continue that relationship with ESPN … and this brings in two great new partners.”
A consistent theme of each of the pacts, meanwhile, is to create more tentpole events within a 2,430-game league schedule that stretches over six months.
The league’s existing deals with other rights holders such as Fox and TNT Sports, meanwhile, remain intact, and will also run through 2028—when Manfred intends to pursue a larger restructuring of the national and local media rights.
