This is a preview of the Joe Sheehan Baseball Newsletter, an e-mail newsletter about all things baseball, featuring analysis and opinion about the game on and off the field from the perspective of the informed outsider.
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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: TV Guide
Vol. 17, No. 96
November 20, 2025
The big baseball news yesterday came far from the Hot Stove League. MLB announced a suite of distribution deals that attempt to patch the hole left by ESPN opting out of the last three years of its agreement, which paid MLB $550 million a year. ESPN, the largest brand in sports with the widest distribution, was the home of Sunday Night Baseball, the wild-card round, and the Home Run Derby, all of which are now elsewhere. In addition, MLB sold one of its best and most valuable products, its streaming arm MLB.tv, to ESPN, to recoup the money left on the table by the opt-out.
In the end, the league will take in a little more money: $200 million a year from NBC, $50 million from Netflix, and the same $550 million a year from ESPN. However, it had to cough up MLB.tv to do it. It was a massive own goal by Manfred, a deal that underprices an asset that was worth more than some franchises. In the short term, MLB.tv will exist parallel to ESPN’s new streaming service, but it’s likely to go away as a standalone product down the road and be folded into the ESPN one, much as NHL games are.
I’m more focused on visibility. The Netflix package includes the Opening Night game, the Home Run Derby, and the Field of Dreams Game. The idea for MLB is that by putting those events on the most popular streaming service in the world -- 300 million people get Netflix -- you’ll expose a lot of non-baseball fans to the sport and make them potential customers. While I get the impulse, I don’t see where three events, one of them batting practice, scattered around the year will do that. It will also be a minor annoyance for Yankee and Giants fans without Netflix, who will miss their team’s first game of 2026. (Yankee fans looking for their team’s games in 2026 will need to search eight options, including three streamers, to find them.)
ESPN is the big winner here, as it will sustain a grip on broadcasting games, with a package of contests on weeknights. It also becomes the streaming home, as MLB was, for six teams that lost their local broadcast deals in recent years. MLB’s diminished presence on ESPN, which was a thorn in Manfred’s side, isn’t helped by this deal. From February:
There is nothing in sports like ESPN. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, Rob Manfred doesn’t like it, but MLB needs ESPN more than ESPN needs MLB. Put together all the streaming packages and Instagram reels and TikTok videos you want, none of it adds up to regular coverage on the biggest sports network in the world. Over the next year, MLB has to figure out a way to make up with the four-letter, taking less money to remain a part of its ecosystem.
MLB would have been better off taking less money and holding on to MLB.tv. This is Manfred’s Jeff Bagwell for Larry Andersen moment.
It’s the NBC part of the package that concerns me. The network adds Sunday Night Baseball to its suite that includes Sunday Night Football and, come February, Sunday Night Basketball. NBC has NBA games scheduled on the first two Sundays of the baseball season, so any baseball games on those nights will be on Peacock. NBC has the rights to first- and second-round NBA playoff games as well as one of the conference finals, so you could see basketball bump baseball to Peacock well into May. Come September, when the playoff races are heating up, NBC will be welcoming back the NFL. The window for Sunday Night Baseball on NBC is 12 to 14 weeks from late May to late August. As many as half the Sunday Night Baseball games will be exclusive to Peacock, and all of the ones during the stretch drive.
This package cements MLB’s position as third behind the NFL and NBA on its own broadcast partner. It’s filler programming between Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Patrick Mahomes, something Ted McGinley and Valerie Bertinelli would have starred in between “The Cosby Show” and “Cheers” on Thursday nights in 1987.
Even that’s not the worst part. NBC becomes the home of the wild-card round, the first three days of the playoffs. ESPN held these rights even before the round was expanded to eight teams playing best-of-three series in 2022. ESPN, of course, has the mothership, ESPN2, ABC and other overflow channels. NBC has NBC. It’s plausible that USA Network could be part of the mix here, as it is for Premier League Soccer and Atlantic 10 basketball, and even CNBC or MSNOW could be an overflow channel. (Memories of MLB playoff games on ABC Family, if you’re old enough.) NBC is relaunching the NBC Sports Network on YouTube TV, and plans to roll it out to cable and satellite customers in the future, though it’s not clear what linear distribution will be in 2026.
I mention all this to say that I think some part of the 2026 playoffs are going to be exclusive to Peacock. At best, it’ll be one first-round game a day on NBC -- akin to ABC’s participation in recent years -- and a tripleheader on USA, and I’m doubtful about even that. NBC is making this deal not to get you to turn to Channel 4 or locate NBCSN, but to build up its streaming service. The NFL led the way, putting a first-round playoff game exclusively on Amazon Prime last year. NBC is going to want to put at least one playoff game, and maybe more, on Peacock.
The ink is barely dry on this deal, and we’re nine months away from even thinking about the ’26 playoff schedule, but this is where I think we’re headed. I also think we could be seeing the end of the all-day scheduling of the first two rounds, first round for sure, as MLB adopts the primetime, overlapping model the NBA and NHL use for their early rounds. If I’m guessing today, I think we’ll get one game on NBC, a doubleheader on USA, and one on Peacock those first two or three days. (I’m quite curious to see how NBC staffs that round, and for matter who their baseball talent will be in general.)
My most significant takeaway is that we’re learning just how little value the extra round of playoffs -- which has deleterious effects on the regular season -- really has. NBC is paying $200 million a year for their package, those Sunday night games, the Sunday morning ones on Peacock, and the first round. If we assign 75% of that value to the playoff games, it’s $150 million a year, or $5 million per team. That’s what MLB is getting for letting 40% of the league into the tournament, making some division winners play an extra round, turning its September into battles not for division crowns but for seeding, letting its best teams coast for six months. Five million dollars per team per year. One Mauricio Dubon. One Jason Adam. One Yoan Moncada.
The wild-card round is both a competitive and a financial failure.
Some of MLB’s TV troubles aren’t entirely of its own making. The cable model around which it built the business for a quarter-century collapsed around them, taking hundreds of millions of dollars a year in rights fees with it. This arc, though, starting with the ESPN opt-out and ending with the sale of MLB.tv and the diminution of Sunday Night Baseball, is on the league. They blew this one, and go into the next set of negotiations, after 2028, in an even weaker position.
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