Roku’s $10M MLB Deal Resumes Despite ESPN Drama

Roku will begin its second season of airing MLB games on Sunday, extending a unique position as both a streamer of original content and a curator of other networks’ programming.

The company will begin the 2025 season of MLB Sunday Leadoff on May 11 with a Cubs-Mets game. Like last year, the early Sunday afternoon games are designed to be a lead-in to the rest of the day’s action across other MLB rights holders. The broadcasts will be produced by the league and air for free on Roku, as well as on MLB.TV.

The MLB games are a centerpiece of Roku’s strategy, recently detailed during a press event, to help solve the fragmentation problem common across sports media. 

“This is a critical way to demonstrate the power of our platform and the sports experience that we’ve built,” Roku Media head of sports Joe Franzetta tells Front Office Sports. “It’s about bringing something to the table that’s complementary to the rest of sports.”

The MLB Sunday Leadoff games, meanwhile, are the subject of some confusion and frustration among some league rights holders. ESPN recently cited Roku’s annual $10 million rights fee, far below ESPN’s own package carrying a $550 million annual cost, as a sign of MLB devaluing its content and part of its justification for walking away from its deal three years early.

The league also monetizes MLB Sunday Leadoff with its own advertising sales, and Roku’s agreement is not a media-rights deal in the traditional sense but rather more of a hybrid arrangement also including a series of marketing components.

Roku City

The streamer, meanwhile, is also working with the league to include MLB logos and player images within Roku City, the company’s highly popular television screensaver and virtual metropolis that reaches more than 40 million U.S. households.

The league will extend its existing, anime-themed “Heroes of the Game” marketing campaign—one that includes stars such as the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani, Yankees’ Aaron Judge, Mets’ Juan Soto, and Pirates’ Paul Skenes—into Roku City. That screensaver already has included a wide range of pop culture easter eggs, and the latest move represents a new level of involvement there by a major sports league. 

“This is about putting MLB stars front and center wherever we can, and tapping into Roku’s big reach,” MLB director of global brand management Steven Tyler tells FOS. “We see this as a huge opportunity to position these games as must-watch events.”