• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 4, 2025

As if Major League Baseball regional/local TV issues aren’t enough, now the long-time sports franchise has felt the pinch from the major national TV sports network: ESPN.

It is opting out of its contract after the 2025 season.

At its core, one wonders whether baseball's problems are declining TV viewership, marketing, older-skewing TV fans for baseball, or perhaps advertising issues.

ESPN believes the league is of lesser value these days -- and while wanting to continue to air baseball games, essentially had wanted to cut in half the annual rights fees it pays to the league to around $200 million.

According to reports, baseball league commissioner Rob Mandred essentially said no way. So ESPN opted out to stop after 2025.

Other reports say streamers -- Amazon Prime Video and Netflix -- as well as NBC could be interested going forward.

Now while regional and local TV packages -- per team, per market -- are key for team owners, Manfred says national TV revenues are crucial to the league going forward. That seems to suggest there is more to the story here than just revenues. Perhaps marketing and promotion concerns are significant factors too.

TV viewership? Right now, it seems stable -- at least on national TV.

In 2024, ESPN “Sunday Night Baseball” viewing was up 6% with 1.5 million Nielsen-measured viewers for 25 games in 2024.

And then things got a bit better -- thanks to key matchups between big name, historical branded teams.The league got a boost last year when the New York Yankees played the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.

On the Fox Television Network, ratings were up 70% to 15.8 million viewers- -- the most-watched since 2017. The downside here was that series wasn’t all that competitive, with the Dodgers winning 4 games to one.

All that would seem positive news. But ESPN might see other factors including an ever-rising median age in baseball viewers -- now at 60 years of age -- which is the oldest among all major sports leagues, according to one source. (NFL, 54; NHL, 52; NBA, 50).

ESPN may figure that all this puts it at somewhat of a disadvantage with advertisers.

Other local TV data might seem troubling. The St. Louis Cardinals -- one of the small to mid-sized market teams -- witnessed a major decline in viewing -- down 25% in 2024 and falling 47% over a two-year period, the lowest in 15 years.

While the on-field performance has not been great for the team recently, the franchise through the years has weathered much of this, continuing to draw viewers in good years and bad. It is regularly among the top four or so teams in terms of local market TV ratings.

And while streaming platforms are seemingly a remedy to troubled regional cable sports TV networks -- especially coming from cable TV cord-cutting issues -- streaming financial and promotion benefits have yet to prove things out.

Pricing for consumers still can also be an issue -- as well as potential blackouts.

And consider that baseball has a long season with a lot of games -- 162. That means more total TV time than any other major sport.

Can the league keep all that interest growing with all of this content -- when sports fans increasingly want to really focus on playoffs and the post-season championship events? And will hardcore fans continue to show up and play ball?