After 36 years, ESPN's ‘Sunday Night Baseball' enters its final season (for now)

New York Times

28-03-2025

Ellis Boyd Redding, the wise man from 'The Shawshank Redemption' (played by Morgan Freeman), famously proclaimed that hope is a dangerous thing and can drive a man insane. But Karl Ravech, the play-by-play voice of ESPN's 'Sunday Night Baseball' and a broadcaster who has been connected to ESPN's baseball coverage since 1995, the year after 'Shawshank' came out, has not lost hope that a partnership between ESPN and Major League Baseball can continue.
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Here is the situation today: Earlier this month, ESPN informed MLB it was opting out of the final three years (2026-28) of its $550 million per season contract with baseball after this year. As part of the dissolution, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred wrote in a memo obtained by The Athletic's Evan Drellich that the league has 'not been pleased with the minimal coverage that MLB has received on ESPN's platforms over the past several years outside of the actual live game coverage.'
Under this backdrop, ESPN begins its 36th and final (for now) season of 'Sunday Night Baseball.' Ravech, analysts David Cone and Eduardo Pérez and reporter Buster Olney will be in San Diego on Sunday to call Braves-Padres at 7 p.m. ET. (The pregame 'Baseball Tonight: Sunday Night Countdown' airs an hour earlier, featuring Kevin Connors, Tim Kurkjian and senior MLB insider Jeff Passan.)
Where does Ravech's optimism come from, given ESPN's opt-out and Manfred's memo, which referred to ESPN as a 'shrinking platform'? Ravech says the source is ESPN's upcoming debut of Flagship, the working name of the direct-to-consumer product expected to be launched around late August. ESPN Flagship will give consumers access to all of the network's programming without needing other subscriptions.
'When you think about the entities that are on that Flagship, I don't want to say it is required, but my goodness if you're a sports fan, you're gonna want to have it,' Ravech said. 'If the sports fan in general wants the Super Bowl, the NFL, the NBA, tennis, golf, college championships, the NHL, Stanley Cup, basically every single color in the crayon box, it would behoove any other sport to want to be on that platform.'
History suggests that once the dam breaks between media partners, it breaks. The Athletic's Andrew Marchand reported there is a growing expectation that MLB could sell the ESPN package in three parts, with Fox Sports emerging as a potential favorite for the Home Run Derby and NBC a contender for Sunday nights.
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The NBC part is interesting because, as I wrote last July, NBC/Peacock has big plans for an NBA 'Sunday Night Basketball' telecast to resemble its NFL 'Sunday Night Football' franchise, and executives there really want to own that night in the minds of sports fans. ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro continues to say he remains interested in re-engaging in a conversation with baseball if the price is right.
'I've been there for 30-some odd years and clearly the evolution and the popularity of the NFL, I think certain things dictate coverage,' Ravech said. 'It's a ratings-driven business. I just look at it as a consumer of sports on television and elsewhere. Who else provides any more coverage of baseball, with the exception of the MLB Network, than ESPN does? I'm not certain that there's another place that does it as frequently, certainly as well on Sundays with Baseball Tonight and the Sunday Night Baseball game, as ESPN.
'People do watch us. Our ratings have gone up on Sunday night consistently over the years, which is a really hard thing to do. Which to me means that we're doing something right to attract a baseball fan. And I think to the credit of baseball, the game is better. The sport is in a better place than it's been with the rule changes.'
One thing the Sunday Night Baseball crew made clear this week is that this season will not be a nostalgia tour, which is what viewers saw with TNT and the NBA.
'We're not going in thinking like this is it,' lead Sunday Night Baseball producer Andy Jacobson said. 'We're looking to be great every week. I think our biggest challenge is being a national broadcast on such a regionalized sport. Who is our fan base? Who's coming in to watch every Sunday? What we strive to do is be different than every other telecast that's out there, whether it is the mic'd up stuff or David Cone watching Justin Verlander warm up for a start from a perch right above the bullpen. We're constantly looking for ways to bring the viewer places that they never get a chance to go.'
'As far as the long-term future, we try to bring value,' Cone said. 'I don't assess value — that's above my pay grade. But if we keep bringing value, we feel like we're gonna continue to sell ourselves as a group, and there'll be a place for that kind of value, a place for us in the future.'
Brian Lawlor, the president of Scripps Sports, told me this week that Scripps has had productive conversations with the WNBA about a long-term deal for ION to remain as the national carrier for the WNBA on Friday nights. The current deal expires at the end of the 2025 season. Lawlor said he hopes a new deal happens during this WNBA season. Last year, WNBA games on ION averaged 670,000 (a 133 percent increase from 2023), and they had seven telecasts that exceeded an average of 1 million viewers.
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'When (the NBA/WNBA) went to market with their rights, they did bundle up some of their rights with all the other networks, but what they did not bundle in was the Friday night rights,' Lawlor said. 'They protected that because of the success we had and what we built. We are still in our original contract with them for the rights to Friday nights, but our long-term expectation is we are going to be the home for the WNBA across the entire country for every game on Fridays.'
An interesting stat: ION says it delivered the largest percentage of female audience of any network airing WNBA games this season — 50 percent of its WNBA audience was female.
Through the first two rounds of the men's tournament, games on CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV averaged 9.4 million viewers. That's the highest number for the opening round of the tournament in 32 years. As always, the historical comparisons are not apples to apples these days, given Nielsen measuring out-of-home viewership with better accuracy. And as Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal noted, the 9.4 million viewers is an average combined across four networks. The average for each game so far on CBS/TNT/TBS/truTV is 3.1 million viewers. But a great start for the chalky men's tournament.
Through two rounds, the 2025 women's Division I basketball tournament is averaging 602,000 viewers across ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU, the second-highest audience through this point since 2009. The second round of the women's tournament averaged 982,000 viewers, the second most-watched second round on record behind the Caitlin Clark-infused 1.4 million viewer average last year.
Second round viewership was up 60 percent from 2023. The first round of the women's tournament averaged 367,000 viewers. That's down 22 percent from 471,000 last year (as expected without Clark) but up 43 percent from 2023.
As baseball fans know, MLB honors Jackie Robinson each year on April 15 to celebrate the day in 1947 that he broke baseball's color barrier. The league's website states: 'Every year on April 15, Baseball honors Jackie's legacy by celebrating his life, values and accomplishments. The extensive and unified League-wide show of support has included retiring Jackie's number throughout the Majors in 1997; dedicating April 15 as Jackie Robinson Day each year since 2004; and requesting that every player and all on-field personnel wear his No. 42 during games scheduled on Jackie Robinson Day since 2009.'
Given how much MLB features Robinson in external PR, the league's choice to not write anything after a webpage about Robinson's time serving in the U.S. Army was removed from the Department of Defense's website last week really stands out. The story was taken down during a purge of government web content spotlighting historical contributions by women and minority groups following President Donald Trump's executive order to end federal support for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. It was eventually restored following a public outcry.
Few would expect a fire-and-brimstone opinion column on a league-owned site, especially given the politics at play, but MLB.com readers deserved a straight news story on the day it occurred, considering Robinson's importance to professional baseball. I'll be thinking about that on April 15.
There is a lot of troubling news in the world today, so it's important to highlight pieces that can lift you to a better place. If you missed it, I highly encourage you to read this remarkable piece from Jon Krawczynski on the Minnesota Timberwolves' decision to start Joe Ingles so his autistic son could see him play.