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🎤 QUICK START ✍️

🏀 Last chance! Today is the final day of voting to grade the 2025 WNBA local broadcasters. If you haven’t yet made your voice heard, take a moment to share your opinions with us!

🏈 SEC goes nine. After much deliberation, the SEC has decided to add a ninth conference game beginning with the 2026 season. The move eliminates one of the hangups preventing the SEC and Big Ten from agreeing on an expanded College Football Playoff format.

🇮🇪 Out on loan. Fox’s No. 2 NFL broadcast team of Joe Davis and Greg Olsen is being loaned out to NFL Network in Week 4 for the Minnesota Vikings-Pittsburgh Steelers game from Dublin, Ireland. In the past, Fox has been reluctant to lend its NFL talent to other networks.

️‍🚨 LEADING OFF 🚨

MLB’s three-year plan

It’s been a whirlwind week in sports media, but two stories have taken up most of the oxygen. Those would be ESPN’s direct-to-consumer launch, and MLB’s reapportionment of the media rights ESPN left on the table earlier this year. We’ll get to the ESPN streamer in today’s Closer. Here, we’ll breakdown what we know about MLB’s new media rights deals, read some tea leaves regarding the grey areas, and assess what it all means.

Here’s what we know so far.

Yesterday, The Athletic reported that ESPN and MLB have reached a “preliminary agreement” that would see the Worldwide Leader license MLB.tv for its new direct-to-consumer platform starting next year. In addition, ESPN would house the local broadcasts of the five teams that MLB currently controls media rights for (Cleveland, San Diego, Minnesota, Arizona, and Colorado). ESPN would also pickup a package of 30-or-so exclusive weekday games to be broadcast to a national audience.

Also yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported NBC is nearing a deal to acquire most of ESPN’s old Sunday Night Baseball package for a price of nearly $200 million per year. This would complete NBC’s year-round Sunday night schedule, with MLB filling in the summer gap between the end of NBA season and the start of NFL season. The package would also include the Wild Card round games currently allotted to ESPN. Peacock will also reportedly be part of the deal on some level (more on that below).

The Journal also reported that Netflix is expected to nab the Home Run Derby at a cost of $35 million annually, as multiple outlets had suggested in the weeks prior. In terms of firmed up reporting, that’s what we know. But there’s still some unknowns.

Earlier this week, A-Block readers will recall a Yahoo Sports report suggesting that Apple TV+ planned to exit its current Friday Night Baseball deal with Peacock in line to overtake that package of games. So far, no other outlets have backed that reporting, and The Athletic still included Apple as a contender for the Sunday Night Baseball package as recently as yesterday, albeit prior to the Journal report later in the day. It’s still unclear whether this is in the works. As it stands, Peacock’s role would presumably be to carry Sunday Night Baseball during times in the sports calendar when NBC would be airing NBA or NFL games. The streamer could potentially have some other games thrown in there as well, though again, Peacock’s exact role is still unclear.

Another key detail in the Journal report is that MLB believes the combined value of its new set of deals will exceed the $550 million average annual value of the current ESPN arrangement, though this isn’t exactly apples-to-apples. Should all of the firm reporting hold true (none of these deals are finalized yet), MLB would be selling and/or licensing significantly more content than it does in the current ESPN deal.

For one, MLB.tv is wholly under the league’s umbrella right now. Licensing the product to ESPN would presumably contribute substantial value to the overall figure that is currently untapped. The same can be said about the five teams currently produced and distributed by MLB. Then, there’s the 30 weekday games ESPN will get. None of this inventory is allocated under the current deals. So while MLB might be getting more than the $550 million per year when it’s all said and done, the league is selling a ton more inventory to get there.

So what does this all mean?

Well, for MLB, it means they’ve cobbled together a solution that will allow them to maintain their expected media revenues for the next three years, at which point the league will take all of its national inventory to market looking for a sizeable increase.

For ESPN, it means they get a piece of MLB that they can use to help unlock the value of its new streaming service. I made the argument yesterday that, for ESPN, licensing the out-of-market MLB.tv package might be preferable to gaining in-market rights. While MLB is posturing to bundle together in-market local rights for at least half of the league come 2028, that package is unlikely to feature the league’s blockbuster teams. That’s not an issue with MLB.tv, which controls out-of-market rights for all 32 clubs. ESPN will be able to market a service that includes the Yankees, Dodgers, Mets, etc., and attract the hoards of fans that live outside their favorite team’s local market. ESPN has made clear that they see the value proposition of holding local rights much more favorably than broadcasting a national package. This licensing agreement helps solidify that strategic evaluation.

For NBC, picking up Sunday Night Baseball completes the full-calendar sweep of Sunday nights. It also bolsters Peacock, which is quickly becoming a must-have streaming service for sports fans.

Given the volume of reporting on the matter this week, and Rob Manfred’s own stated timeline, it’s fair to expect a formal announcement sooner rather than later. Questions will be answered! But if your brain was completely in a pretzel trying to follow this story throughout the week, hopefully this helped clear up some confusion.

💬 AROUND AA 💬

Awful Announcing’s 2025 streaming service rankings for sports fans

With all of the major sports streaming services officially live and ready to take your money, our Matt Yoder cooked up a definitive ranking based on value for price. Check out which streamers sports fans will be hard-pressed to live without here!

📱 SOCIAL EXPERIMENT 🌟

Apple TV’s lead MLS analyst Taylor Twellman caught onto something very fishy going on during Inter Miami’s Leagues Cup game earlier this week. Thanks to some brilliant directing in the production truck, the mystery didn’t take too long to solve.

Steve Smith Sr. was pretty transparent during last night’s Carolina Panthers preseason game. He’s in no position to treat anyone to a free chicken sandwich right now.

🔥THE CLOSER🔥

All of ESPN, for some

At long last, ESPN has finally debuted its direct-to-consumer streaming service. At least, they’ve debuted it for some customers.

If you’d like to read a review about the app itself, check it out here. But for the newsletter, I’m going to focus on a different topic: Distribution Confusion.

If my social media feeds revealed one thing about ESPN’s new app release, it was that consumers are still very confused about what they get, how they get it, and if they even have it.

So let’s set the record straight. The way to guarantee access to the new service right this second is to signup for the $29.99 per month subscription. But assuming you already get ESPN through other means, there’s very little reason to shell out an extra $30.

Right now, Charter, DirecTV, Fubo, Hulu, and Verizon subscribers get full access to the streamer at no extra cost. Simply authenticate your pay TV login in the app, and you’re ready to go. If you’re a Comcast or YouTube TV subscriber, you’ll have to wait. Disney is currently engaged in ongoing carriage negotiations with these distributors, meaning customers for two of the country’s largest pay TV services do not currently have access to all the bells and whistles now available on the ESPN app. These subscribers can still authenticate within the app and watch the linear ESPN networks included in their package, but they won’t be able to view any content previously set aside for ESPN+ (unless they were already subscribed), nor can they use the new integration features. Dish, Sling TV, and Cox are also on the outside looking in.

If these stipulations weren’t really made clear to you, the consumer, you’re not alone. Since announcing a fall launch, ESPN has repeatedly touted the idea that if you already access the network via a pay TV subscription, you’ll be able to authenticate into the new app.

That idea proved to be wishful thinking as several distribution deals still need to be worked out. From an optics perspective, it looks like ESPN hastily rushed this product out to make sure it could launch prior to football season. In the process, they’ve left a number of consumers feeling cheated.

For now, it’s not a huge deal. Those pay TV subscribers without full access to the new ESPN app aren’t missing much other than the ESPN+ content. And if that content is necessary for you, you can still purchase “ESPN Select,” the new name for ESPN+, for the same price.

But in just one month, ESPN’s streaming service will exclusively broadcast its first WWE premium live event, Wrestelepalooza. That puts Disney on the clock to strike deals with the remaining distributors, or risk facing the ire of wrestling fans forced to pay extra for a service they were promised for free. It would be wise for Disney to solidify these deals sooner rather than later, or the goodwill of viewers will start to wear thin.