MLB and ESPN extended their contract agreement through the 2028 season. It looks like the weeknight games will disappear, however:

The deal, which runs through 2028, allows ESPN to show 25 weeks of Sunday Night Baseball and the MLB Little League Classic. It will also have an Opening Night game and the Home Run Derby around the All-Star Game. ESPN can show alternate versions of each game, such as the popular StatCast broadcasts on ESPN2. All telecasts will be exclusive.

ESPN.com

Also, if the wild card round expands, ESPN would carry all those games.

The weeknight games never did that well on ESPN, since they could not compete in the local market. I suspect the network is happy to see them gone.

ESPN is changing the start time for Sunday night games:

ESPN plans to announce it will move up the starting time of the nationally televised game by one hour, with the first pitch planned for shortly after 7 p.m. EDT.

Good.  These games tend to go very late, and this way I have a chance of catching the whole contest.

The headline:

ESPN Extends Veteran Commentator Karl Ravech

Oh, they mean the contract:

ESPN today announced it has reached an extension with veteran commentator Karl Ravech to continue his expanded, multi-sport role at the company. As a significant part of this role, Ravech has been named the voice of the T-Mobile Home Run Derby – exclusively on ESPN – and will provide play-by-play for the telecast. The T-Mobile Home Run Derby is Monday, July 10, at 8 p.m. ET.

Congratulations to Karl! I worked with him for many years on Baseball Tonight, and it was always a pleasure.

ESPN will do a second round of layoffs, this time of in-front of the camera personnel.

The most immediate causes of the layoffs are clear. Over the last several years rights fees have skyrocketed, with ESPN now paying over $3.3 billion annually just to broadcast the NFL and NBA. Simultaneously, ESPN’s subscriber count and viewership—the fabled dual revenue stream that has made it the most envied television company in the country—have tumbled. While the loss of 12 million subscribers over five years is mostly due to generalized cord cutting, and not subscribers specifically dropping ESPN, it doesn’t really matter: It still amounts to losing almost a billion dollars annually. The status quo is unsustainable, and with rights fees already locked in for several years, salaries are one of the biggest areas available to cut expenses.

I cut the cord this winter. The biggest downside will be the inability to watch Red Sox game (they don’t stream on MLB TV because I’m in the Red Sox broadcast area) FoxSports1 games on Saturday, and ESPN Sunday night games. Luckily, I can still listen on streaming audio. I’ve been streaming some spring training games and WBC games, and they look great. For the playoffs, I can buy one of the streaming services like Sling for a month.

We will see what this means for baseball. Rights fees may drop, because networks will no longer have the subscriber base to support the advertising. With MLBAM, however, the majors can take over advertising. At the moment, there are no (or few) ads in between innings on MLBTV streamed games. Eventually, those slots fill up, and MLB won’t need cable anymore. They could even shorten the commercial breaks and make the game faster.

The upheaval won’t be pretty, but I would bet it ends in a better service, more games to watch, and the game as rich as ever. Bring on the disruption!

Via BBTF, ESPN lost seven million subscribers over the last two years:

ESPN’s woes are a bad sign for other cable channels and, to a lesser extent, pay-TV operators. Sports programming and, to a lesser extent, reality TV are key reasons to continue subscribing to traditional cable and satellite providers. You can’t get the Super Bowl live on Netflix or Amazon streaming services.

Subscriber losses suggest ESPN is less of a must-have, or that cable operators decide they won’t pay heavily for ESPN2, ESPN News and other sister channels, and may push them to lesser tiers as “skinny packages” become more common.

Note that MLB is well positioned to take advantage of this decline in traditional delivery systems. MLBAM pioneered live streaming, so it could end up that to survive, ESPN starts streaming using MLBAM technology. Sling is already streaming ESPN and other cable channels. I think the news is less dire that this report shows, and ESPN already cut staff to stay profitable. It will be interesting to see how all this shakes out over the next few years.

A fan caught sleeping during a Sunday Night Baseball ESPN broadcast is suing for $10 million.

Thing is, the ESPN broadcast didn’t say any of the things alleged in Rector’s suit. Kruk and Shulman did make fun of him a bit — saying a ballpark isn’t the place to sleep and saying he was “oblivious” — but it was hardly “the avalanche of disparaging words.”

Instead, it sounds like Rector’s suit is including what online commenters said about him, and thus he’s trying to blame the Yankees, ESPN and MLB for the reaction in the comment section. That’s a precedent that would turn the Internet upside down, if it were to hold up in court, which doesn’t seem at all likely.

Right. However, I do hope this wakes up ESPN a bit, since they do have to send out their lawyers to fight this while they could be more productive activities. There was a game going on, 2-1 in the fourth inning, and the announcers would rather talk about a sleeping fan than call the game. I will remind my friends in Bristol that their main job in baseball broadcast is to comment on the action. If Dan Shulman and John Kruk are so bored by a 2-1 game that they need to comment on sleeping fans, maybe ESPN needs to hire a new crew. Maybe the fans should bring a class action suit for lack of play-by-play.

I suspect supporting rich television stations is as bad as supporting rich team owners.

If tax breaks are good for business, then provide a low-tax environment that allows businesses to succeed or fail without picking winners, or in this case, supporting someone who already won. If a company decides that political lobbying is a good way to make money, something is wrong with the system! What this comes down to is the 3.6 million people of Connecticut, whose money is taxed both when they get paid and when they buy something, supporting 4000 people at ESPN. They were extremely well paid before these tax breaks took effect.

Mr. Malloy, for his part, is comfortable with the state’s ties to ESPN. In fact, the governor said he would like more of them.

“We want a larger footprint for ESPN in Connecticut rather than a smaller footprint for ESPN in Connecticut because we know that a large footprint is harder to move out,” Mr. Malloy said.

Baloney. Connecticut was a manufacturing powerhouse as late as the 1960s. Plenty of companies had huge footprints, but when other areas of the country offered better business climates, they picked up and moved out. This is a not too recent aerial view of the General Electric plant in Bridgeport, where my dad worked for nearly five decades. In this shot, there are only a few buildings left, but when I was young it extended up Bond Street, and across Boston Avenue down Seaview Avenue. The area is now a pit of crushed brick. Unlike those companies, ESPN’s license forces it to stay in Connecticut. The state should not be concerned with the footprint.

Reason TV interview Robert Lipsyte, the new ombudsman for ESPN.

Peter Abraham notes this change with the new ESPN deal:

When ESPN televises a game on Monday or Wednesday, that game will no longer be blacked out in the markets of the two teams. In other words, you can choose to watch the Red Sox on NESN or ESPN on those nights.

In New York and Boston, that’s a pretty significant concession. NESN and YES can’t be too pleased with that.

That’s really good news. In reality, most locals will watch the game on NESN or YES, since it’s their habit to tune in there. It really helps fans of those teams outside the broadcast area who might otherwise get blacked out do to the strange shape of some of these areas. I hope this is the start of breaking down the blackout rules completely.

ESPN signed a new agreement with Major League Baseball to make teams even richer:

ESPN has inked an eight-year deal with MLB worth $5.6 billion, according to the Sports Business Journal. The astronomical numbers work out to roughly $700 million per year. If that number seems large – the current deal works out to roughly $306 million per year – it is by design: ESPN absolutely needed to overpay for MLB rights to keep all (or even some) their games from going to NBC.

That money gets divided evenly among the teams, so that’s about 23 million per team per year, or a superstar contract. As the article points out, the national, over the air broadcasts are still up for grabs. That’s on top of all the money teams are pulling as local advertisers flock to sporting events, and MLBAM keeps the cash flowing. It’s a reason the Dodgers were able to trade for all those Red Sox contracts, and why Boston may be able to rebuild very quickly. Be prepared to be shocked by the amount of money teams start paying for free agents. Everyone is rich again, like in the early 1990s.

Brooke Hundley filed a lawsuit suing ESPN:

Hundley, who is seeking more than $15,000 in damages, said she lost her job, subsequent job opportunities, damage to her reputation and has been harassed by the public as a result of the publicity.

I’m surprised ESPN doesn’t just give her the money and make her sign an agreement that she never talks about it again. They probably spend that much in a day on feeding their super bowl crew. The lawyers to defend ESPN are going to cost way more than that. They should write her a check and stop the bad publicity.

MLB FanHouse complains about the ESPN Sunday night schedule:

On Tuesday, ESPN released the schedule for its centerpiece baseball broadcast, Sunday Night Baseball, and I learned, once again to my chagrin, that as far as televised baseball is concerned, U.S. geography is pretty much confined to a Mobius strip that leaves the U.S. with just one coast and one time zone.

In the first eight weeks of the Sunday telecasts, six of the eight games will be in either American League or National League East cities, that five of the eight will include only teams from the Eastern Time Zone and that eight of the eight will have at least one team calling EDT (it will be daylight time by then) home.

One of the great things about having 26 teams in the majors in the early 1990s was that worked out to one stadium per week for Sunday Night Baseball. The original contract required ESPN to visit every ballpark during the year. The first month of the season would almost always be on the west coast, since the weather was good and there was little chance of a postponement. Times have changed. Maybe in the next deal MLB can put in a clause where Sunday night baseball has to originate from at least four ballparks in each division.