Overall view of Truist Park in the fifth inning during game two of a double header between the Atlanta Braves and the Miami Marlins on August 9, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Matthew Grimes Jr. | Atlanta Braves | Getty Images
Major League Baseball is nearing a finalized agreement with Disney‘s ESPN, Comcast‘s NBC Sports and Netflix on a new three-year media rights deals for packages of live games.
Earlier this year, ESPN opted out of its $550 million-per-year deal for Sunday Night Baseball. That package will be split into two parts for 2026-2028, if a deal closes.
An agreement hasn’t yet been finalized and may still fall apart.
Under the terms currently being discussed, NBC would acquire all of the league’s Sunday games and Wild Card playoff games for about $200 million per year, according to people familiar with the matter. Netflix will get the rights to the Home Run Derby for about $50 million a year, according to two people familiar with the deal.
ESPN is getting a brand new package of rights for $550 million, according to people familiar with the matter. ESPN has roughly assigned about $450 million in value to license MLB TV, the league’s digital out-of-market package of games.
ESPN would also acquire in-market games to five local teams — the Cleveland Guardians, San Diego Padres, Minnesota Twins, Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies — and will get a new mid-week package of national games.
MLB, NBC, ESPN and Netflix all declined to comment on the deal.
The three-year deal for the Sunday games, Wild Card playoff games and Home Run Derby would mean all of the league’s major media rights expire after the 2028 season.
On an apples-to-apples basis, MLB didn’t recoup the money lost by ESPN opting out of its seven-year Sunday Night Baseball three years early. Still, it would mean that MLB developed new media partnerships with NBC and Netflix, which could both be bidders for more MLB games after 2028. That may be beneficial for the league from both a monetary and reach basis.
The talks come as the traditional TV business has been bleeding customers for years and as streamers look to get into lucrative sports deals.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred sent a memo to the league’s teams in February saying that ESPN had asked the league to “reduce the amount they [ESPN] pay for MLB content over the remainder of the term.”
ESPN used to air six MLB games a week, but it dropped to three games a week about 20 years ago, and went down to just one a week in 2022, meaning it was paying $550 million a year for roughly 30 games.
But the MLB didn’t want to renegotiate. Manfred also wrote that he took issue with the traditional TV model and felt that ESPN wasn’t doing enough to promote baseball.
“We do not think it’s beneficial for us to accept a smaller deal to remain on a shrinking platform,” he wrote to MLB owners in the memo first obtained by The Athletic.
— CNBC’s Michele Luhn contributed to this report.
— Disclosure: CNBC’s parent company Comcast also owns NBC Sports.
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