MLB Leaving ESPN following 2025 season
- Thread starter AmericanDragon
- Start date
MLB is slowly trying to ensure that no one can watch its product on television.
Either that, or MLB is jumping off of a sinking, shameless political ship.
Joe Morgan and Jon Miller calling the games together on ESPN was the last time I enjoyed watching baseball on their network outside of the postseason. Their coverage has only gone downhill since. Here comes yet another streaming package MLB will con fans into subscribing for a couple weeks of games in the Wild Card Round and Divisional Series.
It’s been years since I even watched the World Series, much less any other MLB game.
Red Sox are technically my favorite team because they were my favorite when I did watch, but I couldn’t tell you the name of a single player on the team.
Just a terribly boring sport to watch. Even when I was working in sports I always hated when I had to sometimes work a baseball game. It was never one of my primary sports I worked but sometimes I’d have to fill in. Easy sport to work (if everyone else shows up to work that is), but long ass games and boring.
Used to love baseball growing up. Huge Reds fan, loved watching Ricki, Jose, Mark etc with the A’s, etc. Started to lose interest during the strikes and briefly became interested again during the HR steroid period. Funny how life is. Baseball was fun to play and watch as a kid and thought Golf was boring all around. Now, I love watching and playing golf and haven’t watched baseball in years. I’ll never understand how or why they continue to pay these guys the insane salaries they do.
I have been casual at best since the strike of 1994. I am also a Reds fan and the team has sucked since 1995 with a few aberrations.
Specialty pitchers pushed games to three hours. The strike hurt but Sammy and McGwire brought baseball back. I don't think steroids hurt the game as much as some think.
I tend to believe that the glut of games available on TV totally fatigued the fan. I remember Saturday afternoon Game of the Week and how special it was to watch it. Must see. Attending a game was a fans dream. But that dream became an expensive one.
Big TV contracts severely crimped the budget of a family outing, sending a game into the $400 to $500 price range for many. Four decent seats, 4 soft drinks, 4 hot dogs at least, souvenirs, parking, gas to the game. The game was no longer budget friendly for families. Still it has survived but it will never be the same.
I tend to believe that the glut of games available on TV totally fatigued the fan. I remember Saturday afternoon Game of the Week and how special it was to watch it. Must see. Attending a game was a fans dream. But that dream became an expensive one.
Big TV contracts severely crimped the budget of a family outing, sending a game into the $400 to $500 price range for many. Four decent seats, 4 soft drinks, 4 hot dogs at least, souvenirs, parking, gas to the game. The game was no longer budget friendly for families. Still it has survived but it will never be the same.
Good news in Cincinnati all you need to do is pay $19.99 per month on top of an Amazon Prime subscription, or download the Fan Duel app and pay the fee if you’d like to casually tune in to see why they’re firing off the fireworks in the stadium you can hear from your house.
It’s impossible to be casually interested just because you live in the city. Need to be intentional about it, which is not going to help grow the fan base.
Steroids were great for the game. Eliminating them hurt it.
Edit: eliminating the obvious and open use hurt the game. Steroid use has not been eliminated.
Baseball is pretty much a regional sport, I follow the Reds closely, but would almost never watch a Sunday night game between two random teams (one of which is almost guaranteed to be the Yankees or the Dodgers). But tbh, I only watched one NFL game all season so I am not much of a TV watcher anyway.
I'm with you partly. A Red Sox and Brewers fan since I was young in the early 80's (actually liked the Dodgers in late 70's and 80's too), and would still consider myself a fan of the Red Sox and Brewers. Never seen either team play in person, even though I have been to games in Atlanta, Texas, Cincinnati, Philadelphia.
But I too would have trouble naming players on either team. For the Sox, there's Devers, and I read they signed Bregman, and ...I'm not sure after that. For the Brewers I could name a couple as well; and then for both teams if you gave me a multiple choice list I might get a few more right. I may look once a month at the standings, or the stats for those 2 teams, and if I see either playing I might watch an inning occasionally.
I love baseball, don't think it is boring at all. But the older you get while still working, the less time you have for watching sports. And to see an entire season of baseball for your favorite team takes much more total time than other sports:
MLB: 400-450 hours
NHL: 160-220 hours
NBA: 160-220 hours
college basketball: 60-85 hours
NFL: 50-65 hours
college football: 40-55 hours
But also the less you watch of any sport, the less you know the players, the less you become interested/invested in it. The exception is if you either bet games or play fantasy sports.
Lastly, I think MLB has become less enjoyable, with all of the frequent pitching changes, and so few good hitters now, where teams are batting like in the .240's and making the playoffs. Years ago the worst offense in the league would be hitting at least .250's. But now it's all about the HR, which means more K's too. There's so much more to hitting than hitting a HR.
My problem with baseball is numerous things.
Once i got to college I discovered sports, notably lacrosse, that didn’t exist in the high school ranks around here that are way more entertaining to watch and play than baseball, so that made baseball become more boring.
And long story short, I used to work in sports and some stuff happened that made me resent the sport of baseball. Then I got burnt out on working in sports, and that bled over into my personal relationship with sports and I’ve never liked sports anywhere close to as much as I did pre-burnout.
And it’s certainly not due to lack of time, it’s all because of burnout. I’m single, so no romantic partner to take up my time. Thankfully I have no kids, so no parental duties to take up my time. Despite working full time now, I work around 60% as many hours now than when I worked in sports, so considerably less working hours taking up my time every week.
I think it says something about the sport when a baseball organization announces that moderate facial hair is now acceptable and that's somehow news in 2025.
Baseball - where it's always 1927. Come enjoy a game and maybe afterward we'll all go see a Buster Keaton picture.
Baseball - where it's always 1927. Come enjoy a game and maybe afterward we'll all go see a Buster Keaton picture.
ESPN is all in on nfl and nba which takes up a lot of airtime is that why mlb was upset of lack of coverage?
Literally espn talks about nfl every day for hours bc that’s where the viewers are - nfl is now a 365 day sport.
They are already talking about mock drafts and free agency and salary caps while mlb is in spring training.
Literally espn talks about nfl every day for hours bc that’s where the viewers are - nfl is now a 365 day sport.
They are already talking about mock drafts and free agency and salary caps while mlb is in spring training.
Baseball has fallen greatly over the years. It used to truly be the national sport. When I was a kid, every little community had their own team. I recall as a kid watching an uncle pitch on Sunday afternoons on his small community team. Many small towns had their own minor league teams. The death of the small town minor league teams happened as television came on the scene.
The MLB thing is kind of strange because I remember that last year, TV ratings and attendance were quite a bit up, pretty good sign for a sport that is allegedly dying.
Ya I think people are getting dodgers fatigue and with the looming strike in a couple years it could go south in a hurry. I still don’t think mlb fully recovered from the strike shortened season 30 years ago.
Are other cities like Cincinnati in that you cannot watch the local market team without buying an additional dedicated streaming package?
In 1950's-60s, there was a semi-pro league in NKy with a couple of Cincy teams and a total of 6-8 teams. Called the Buckeye League. Good baseball. Lots of might-have-beens that WW2 got in the way of and also several over-the-hill MLers. I recall Jim O'Toole in particular as well as Joe Nuxhall's younger brother. I saw a lot of the games as Dad umpired like 20-25 of their games a year. He also did local colleges.
Sounds like it was ESPN that made the call and not some mutual agreement like the MLB Commish is trying to spin it to be.
Reds will be on Fan Duel that replaced Bally Sports. So no extra pay beyond your regular cable/streaming service. How wide spread that agreement is beyond Cincy I don't know. Same broadcast crew as last season.
When I was a kid, there was a Class D minor league in western Ky, west Tn. Illinois and Indiana called the KITTY league. HOF Red Schoendist played for Union City. Some future Cardinals played for the Paducah Chiefs. A guy from Lone Oak, bought a lot of the seats from the Texas Rangers when they refurbished years ago. He was going to put them in the old Paducah minor league stadium if they would let him bring a new minor league team to Paducah, but they turned him down.
MLB and nba are toast - was listening to radio doing stuff this afternoon and this national radio random show I had on talking about the stafford stuff…
MLB spring season and nba getting close to playoffs nah we gonna talk about Matt stafford rumors
MLB spring season and nba getting close to playoffs nah we gonna talk about Matt stafford rumors
I got an email and typed in my zip code here in Lexington, and says I can get it for $20 a month, or $105 for the season I think
Curious if this will alter what players are paid at some point. If NBA rating continue to be poor than now tv rights deals will be less and NBA makes less money and can’t pay players as much.
Yeah, the app is not free in Cincinnati either. Maybe one of the providers has a package with fanduel, but I don’t think Youtubetv does.
The NBA just agreed to a $76 billion TV deal. I think they’ll be OK.
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