X.com – ESPN and Major League Baseball (MLB) have decided to conclude their national TV partnership after the 2025 season, opting out of the remaining years of their contract. This move comes amidst MLB’s concerns over ESPN’s limited coverage of the sport beyond live games. The decision has sparked a range of reactions from fans and analysts; some view it as a step forward due to ESPN’s reduced focus on baseball, while others feel nostalgic about the end of ‘Sunday Night Baseball’. Speculation is rife about MLB’s next broadcasting home, with networks like Fox and emerging streaming giants like Amazon and NBCUniversal being floated as potential successors. This shift could redefine how baseball is consumed in the digital age.
This is really good news because Sunday Night Baseball absolutely fucking blows for the following reasons.
- ESPN doesn’t care about baseball. They cancelled Baseball Tonight, never show any highlights, don’t cover free agency or winter meetings, don’t highlight players and never do anything to grow the sport. They are quite literally the worst partner you could bring to the table for a national, season-long broadcast. ESPN hates baseball.
- The product is trash. The broadcast is trash. The announcers and the featured segments and the bullshit graphics and everything in-between = trash. It’s a terrible, awful, no good, very bad viewing experience.
- Jessica Mendoza sucks at calling MLB. It’s nice that she tries so hard, but she’s terrible and shouldn’t have the job.
- Boog Sciambi pisses me off because he calls Sunday Night Baseball games more passionately than Cubs games and I hate him for it. He makes me sick and I blame Sunday Night Baseball and ESPN’s terrible culture for creating that monster. His Cubs’ allegiance is (and always will be) secondary.
- Sunday Night Baseball ruins the Cubs’ schedule every summer. They love cramming 3 stops at Wrigley + another 2-3 Cubs road games at the absolute worst time. And it’s bullshit because the Cubs play the most day games of anyone in MLB, and Sunday is a day game for 14 of the 15 games. What should be a nice advantage for the Cubs’ circadian rhythm actually turns into a huge disadvantage because everyone else is playing during the day on Sunday. It’s complete bullshit and I blame ESPN.
- I hate the way ESPN covers Wrigley Field. The last broadcast you watched would look no different than the first broadcast you watched: drone shots on Waveland, walk-through the bleacher concourse, sponsored segment on the history of the scoreboard, 2016 World Series highlight package, rinse and repeat.
- Sunday Night Baseball is a burden on the players. Especially if you’re traveling after the Sunday game or trying to spend time with your wife and kids. It really creates just an unnecessarily miserable experience for veterans and that’s a bunch of bullshit they don’t need to deal with.
- As a grown ass fan, I don’t want to watch baseball on a Sunday night. It’s only going to ruin my sleep because I’m either too pissed off or too amped up. It’s never peaceful or casual or really enjoyable. And the problem is that bleeds into giving me a case of the Mondays and there’s nothing worse than a case of the Mondays.
For these reasons, I think it’s a really good thing that Sunday Night Baseball is being cancelled next year.
Good for Rob Manfred for sticking up for his league. A lot of people shit on him for being a bad commissioner and those people are stupid. They think everything is just so easy and he wields unlimited and unilateral executive authority over every little fucking thing in the game when that just isn’t the case.
So hopefully this gives him some credit with the critics. God knows he deserves it.