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No Joy in Manfred’s Mudville

MLB and ESPN announced they will part ways at the end of the 2025 season, after the sports network refused to re-up their current, diluted deal. Now, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is trying to save face while scrambling to find a new home for America’s pastime.

Rob Manfred
Manfred’s new challenge will be stewarding the league toward something that better serves the consumer. After all, baseball’s true existential challenge, beyond the collective second-screen ADHD of modern society, is that, while the NFL and the NBA have gone national, baseball is still fundamentally a local game. Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Dylan Byers
February 21, 2025

This week, in what may be remembered as another pivotal regression in Major League Baseball’s retreat from the zeitgeist, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro told the league that his network would be opting out of its annual $570 million contract at the end of this season. Before ESPN’s letter could even be FedExed to MLB headquarters in Midtown, commissioner Rob Manfred was trying to get ahead of the news and put his own spin on the ball. “We do not think it’s beneficial for us to accept a smaller deal to remain on a shrinking platform,” Manfred wrote in a memo to his owners that soon somehow made its way into the digital pages of The Athletic—thereby likely putting the final kiss-off on a relationship that has existed for three and a half decades.