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✂️ Write less, film more. Spotify laid off special projects lead Andrew Gruttadaro and staff writer Miles Surrey on Monday, with as many as six total editorial staffers expected to be impacted. Variety reports that up to 15 employees across The Ringer and Spotify Studios could lose jobs as the company doubles down on video and sheds the people who built it on writing.

🎙️ Full circle. Madelyn Burke is joining ESPN as a SportsCenter anchor in April after a decade covering the New York Giants for MSG Network and WFAN. She started as a production assistant at Super Bowl 42 in Arizona. Nearly 20 years later, she's anchoring at Bristol.

📺 Flood the zone. NFL Network will produce its own separate draft broadcast even after formally transitioning under the ESPN umbrella, with Rich Eisen expected to return as host. That gives ESPN four distinct NFL Draft telecasts — Greenberg, the GameDay crew on ABC, McAfee's spectacular, and now Eisen — all on the same night.

⚾ Fresh start. NBC revealed that Jason Benetti, Rick Manning, and Ryan Rowland-Smith will call the first Sunday Night Baseball of the season on March 29, as the Cleveland Guardians visit the Mariners.

🎭 Marvel, but baseball. The Usos are the latest addition to Netflix's MLB Opening Night broadcast for Wednesday's Yankees-Giants game, joining Barry Bonds, Bert Kreischer, Jameis Winston, CC Sabathia, and Elle Duncan. Netflix only has three MLB broadcasts a year. They are making all of them count.

🎧 Odd couple. Chuck Todd and J.A. Adande are teaming up for Dynastic, a long-form sports podcast launching Tuesday that takes deep dives into how franchises build dynasties. The Dodgers and Steelers are up first, with episodes running for around 2.5 hours. Todd helped found SportsBusiness Daily in 1994 before his NBC News run, so the pairing isn't as strange as it sounds.

⚽ End of an era. Hudson River Blue is shutting down next week after 13 years covering NYCFC, becoming another casualty of the slow erosion of independent soccer media. The site survived the SB Nation cuts, relaunched independently, and kept going on passion alone. That eventually runs out.

Fourteen months ago, Rob Manfred called ESPN a "shrinking platform" in a memo to teams and used it to justify opting out of a $550 million-per-year deal with six years left. The memo set off a chain reaction that has fundamentally reshaped how Major League Baseball will be watched in 2026 and for the foreseeable future. The result is the most fragmented, most expensive, and arguably most interesting media landscape in the sport's history.

Here's what's actually happening and where to find it.

Netflix

The most intriguing addition to baseball's broadcast portfolio is also, somehow, its most anticipated event. Netflix landed a three-year deal worth roughly $50 million per season covering Opening Night, the Home Run Derby, and the Field of Dreams Game — all produced in partnership with MLB Network. It's a limited inventory by design. Netflix doesn't want a weekly baseball package. It wants tentpole events it can build broadcasts around, the same way it built the Christmas Day NFL games into a statement about its place in live sports. Wednesday’s Yankees-Giants opener — with Matt Vasgersian, CC Sabathia, Hunter Pence, Elle Duncan, Barry Bonds, Lauren Shehadi, Jameis Winston, Bert Kreischer, and now the Usos all involved — is exactly that strategy in action. The Home Run Derby follows in July. Nielsen is measuring both.

NBC/Peacock

NBC is back in baseball for the first time since 2000, and the package it secured is genuinely comprehensive. The three-year deal — worth up to $200 million annually, with fees that fluctuate based on viewership — gives NBC 25 Sunday Night Baseball games per season, the entire Wild Card round, exclusive primetime windows on Opening Day and Labor Day, the Sunday morning Leadoff package on Peacock, and a July 5 roadblock in which every MLB game plays exclusively on NBC or Peacock. Jason Benetti calls Sunday Night Baseball alongside a rotating group of local analysts with ties to the teams playing that week, a format he pioneered on Peacock's Sunday Leadoff package in 2022 and 2023. Thursday is NBC's Opening Day, and Sunday is its first Sunday Night Baseball.

Fox

Fox remains the most stable presence in baseball's national media landscape, and its 2026 package looks largely familiar. Baseball Night in America runs 24 Saturday primetime windows, running from March 28 through the End of the regular season, with a gap in late June and early July, almost certainly due to Fox's World Cup commitments, which the network has called the biggest logistical undertaking in its history. All Fox games are exclusive to the network and won't air on local RSNs, so MLB.tv is the only way to watch games not shown in your market. FS1 carries an additional 39 games. Joe Davis and John Smoltz return as the lead broadcast team. Fox also holds the World Series through 2028, plus both League Championship Series.

ESPN

ESPN's 2026 MLB package looks nothing like the one it walked away from. Rather than Sunday nights and marquee events, ESPN went local, acquiring the in-market broadcast rights for six clubs whose local broadcasts are currently produced by the league: Cleveland, San Diego, Seattle, Minnesota, Arizona, and Colorado. The network also took over MLB.tv, housing the out-of-market subscription service within its new direct-to-consumer app, which has created considerable confusion for fans who now need an ESPN Unlimited subscription to purchase the package, unless they're already auto-renewing from last season. The national package consists of 30 exclusive weeknight games, beginning April 15 on Jackie Robinson Day with Mets-Dodgers at Dodger Stadium, which Joe Buck will call. ESPN's first-half schedule features multiple weeks with games on two separate weeknights, and three weeks with three weeknight games, including a 7/10 p.m. doubleheader.

TBS

TNT Sports' Tuesday night package continues as one of the sport's most consistent national windows. All 2026 TBS games air on Tuesdays under the MLB Tuesday branding, and the Yankees lead the first-half schedule with five appearances — the most of any team. Brian Anderson, who signed a multi-year extension with TNT Sports in October 2024, remains the lead play-by-play voice, working alongside Ron Darling and Jeff Francoeur in the booth. Lauren Shehadi rotate as studio hosts, with Pedro Martinez, Jimmy Rollins, and Curtis Granderson serving as analysts. TBS also retains the NLDS and NLCS through 2028, keeping the postseason split with Fox intact.

Apple TV

Friday Night Baseball enters its fifth season on Apple TV+ in 2026 and isn't going anywhere until at least 2028. Wayne Randazzo, Dontrelle Willis, and Heidi Watney return as one crew, with Alex Faust, Ryan Spilborghs, and Tricia Whitaker as the second. Two exclusive games every Friday, 25 weeks, no local blackouts, available in 60 countries. The fifth season opens March 27 with Angels-Astros and Guardians-Mariners.

The package has quietly become one of the better arguments for streaming baseball. Research firm Antenna found that baseball games accounted for six of Apple TV+'s ten biggest subscription drivers between April and September 2025 — a single Dodgers-Yankees game generated 722,000 new signups, more than any episode of The Morning Show. For a product that launched to reviews so bad that it was deemed "unlistenable" in year one, that's a real turnaround.

MLB Network

Entering its 18th season, MLB Network remains the connective tissue that holds all of this together. The cable channel's suite of studio programming — MLB Central, MLB Now, Intentional Talk, MLB Tonight, Big Inning, and Quick Pitch — returns in full, with Eric Hosmer and Kevin Kiermaier as the newest additions to its ever-growing analyst rotation. Live out-of-market games air throughout the season, starting with Tigers-Padres on Opening Day, and the Showcase package returns with weekly network-produced telecasts.

The big picture

As Drew Lerner wrote when the deals were announced, MLB saved face but not necessarily money. NBC and Netflix together are paying roughly $250 million annually for what ESPN had been paying $550 million for, and the league had to throw in additional inventory on top of the old package to get there. ESPN, meanwhile, is paying a similar $550 million annually for a package that is fundamentally different in character, built around local rights and MLB.tv rather than national marquee windows.

What MLB got in return is a presence on more platforms than it has ever had at once: Netflix, NBC, ESPN, Fox, TBS, Apple TV, and MLB Network all carrying games in 2026. There will be 47 over-the-air windows this season, a significant increase from last year. Whether that fragmentation helps or hurts the sport's casual audience is the question the next three years will answer. The current deals all expire after 2028, when Fox and TNT's agreements run out alongside the new ones, and baseball gets to renegotiate everything at once. Wednesday’s Opening Night on Netflix is the first data point in that argument.

March Madness debuted a handful of new broadcasters and a handful of new gimmicks this weekend — and the gap in quality between those two things was enormous.

Nate Burleson, Bruce Pearl, and Renee Montgomery all made strong first impressions on CBS and TNT, while Oz the Mentalist and "Old Ball" left viewers wondering who exactly approved any of this. Drew Lerner and Brendon Kleen break it all down on Monday’s edition of The Play-By-Play, plus the latest news surrounding the NFL's future on ESPN.

Watch the episode on YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple.

"Everybody that worked with Brandon couldn't stand him. He's the bad teammate. He would trash his producers. He would belittle them." — WFAN's Gregg Giannotti going scorched earth on Brandon Tierney after Tierney called him a bad teammate for a prank call he didn't reveal for a full year.

"When you talk about my character, now you're f*cking dead wrong." — Tierney firing back on his YouTube channel, drawing the line between jokes about his broadcasting and attacks on who he is as a person.

"Do you know the rapper Eminem?" "I don't." — TNT's Adam Lefkoe and Bruce Pearl, after Pearl had no idea what a Lose Yourself reference was during March Madness coverage.

"I'm so glad that the sport that changed my life is in this man's hands." — ESPN's Richard Jefferson on Mike Breen, saying Breen handles the game with care and responsibility that most people in the industry only pretend to have.

"I had been trying to do that for like 13, 14 years, and TNT and ESPN had blocked it." — Charles Barkley on finally getting to work alongside Dick Vitale during the NCAA Tournament, calling it one of the coolest things he's ever done.

"Y'all can kiss my big Black ass, I'm gonna say what I gotta say." — Barkley again, this time on The Dan Patrick Show, defending his belief in corporal punishment.

"There's never been a worse sports trade. He should come to a Laker game. Bathe in the applause. Bathe in the adoration." — Bill Simmons on fired Mavericks GM Nico Harrison, suggesting the man who traded Luka Dončić for Anthony Davis and spare parts should stop hiding from Dallas fans and start accepting gratitude from Lakers fans instead.

I've lived in Greenville, South Carolina, since October 2022, so I have an obvious rooting interest in what I'm about to say. But Tracy Wolfson and Kyle Tucker don't.

Wolfson was here for the NCAA Tournament's first and second rounds as part of CBS's broadcast crew alongside Ian Eagle, Bill Raftery, and Grant Hill — a team that called Duke's narrow escape against Siena, VCU's upset of North Carolina, and a full house at Bon Secours Wellness Arena for all of it. When she got home, she told her followers that Greenville should be a Tournament site every year.

Tucker — who returned to sports media just last month after 17 months away to join 247Sports as Director of College Basketball Content, and has spent two decades covering this sport — called Greenville the best-kept secret on the East Coast. The tweet became, by his own admission, the most interacted-with post of his many years on the platform.

That reaction tracks for anyone who has spent real time here. Greenville's downtown has a way of catching first-time visitors completely off guard because nothing about the city's reputation precedes it. It doesn't have Charlotte's or Atlanta's name recognition, Columbia's or Chapel Hill's college-town identity, or Charleston's coastal draw. What it has is a walkable, well-built downtown that rewards people who show up without expectations.

But the part worth sitting with isn't the vibes. Greenville is never getting a professional sports franchise. Sitting between Atlanta and Charlotte — two cities that already have every major pro sport covered — that was decided a long time ago. What events like the NCAA Tournament give a city like this is something a franchise can't: a weekend where the entire country's sports media attention passes through your downtown, and people like Wolfson and Tucker go home and tell their audiences about a place they didn't expect to love.

Greenville County Council approved $282 million in arena renovations in February — expanded concourses, new entrances, better circulation, a 6,600-seat outdoor amphitheater — with construction expected to begin later this year. The concourse problem, a persistent knock on Bon Secours for years, is already being addressed. When it's fixed, the argument for Greenville as a permanent fixture in the Tournament rotation becomes much harder to dispute.

Wolfson said the city should be back every year. She's not wrong.