00:00Major League Baseball has seen growth in its viewership and popularity as well, which I think surprises a lot of people, maybe even surprises ESPN.
00:08ESPN is still in the business of airing baseball games, not as many as obviously it once was.
00:14And we've seen a spike in viewership going back to 2024. Fox up almost 10 percent, and that's whether it's traditional Fox, FS1, roughly the same numbers.
00:24ESPN even, 21 percent. TBS almost 30 percent. MLB Network right around 13, 14 percent. MLB TV, which of course the league loves to see, that is up a third, almost 34 percent here.
00:41What do you think has led to this? I mean, is it speeding up the game? Is it the ghost runner and the pitch clock, all of these things? Or is there something else at play?
00:49Well, we're getting big teams playing big games, and that's always going to help.
00:56These current playoffs, you've got the Yankees, you've got the Red Sox. It's a huge matchup.
01:01You've got the big teams from Los Angeles and Chicago and Philadelphia all in there.
01:05The first game of the Yankees-Red Sox series, it drew a record 6.5 million viewers for a wildcard playoff game on ESPN.
01:15They averaged 4.4 million, and they got three out of the four series, all went to three games, a deciding final game.
01:23And as you know, those deciding games draw the biggest ratings of all.
01:27So in a couple of days, we'll see really huge numbers for baseball.
01:32Now, all this is coming up at a time when ESPN said, hey, we think we're paying too much for baseball.
01:38They've been sort of downgrading the amount of baseball that they've been airing over the last four or five years, going from like four or five games a week down to maybe just on Sunday.
01:49And so they're looking at themselves and saying, hey, we're paying $550 million.
01:52What are we paying that for?
01:53And they had an opportunity to opt out of their deal, and they opted out of their deal.
01:58So that led baseball to sort of scramble.
02:01They've got a lot of deals that seem to be in place.
02:04They haven't announced it.
02:05Maybe they'll announce it right after the World Series.
02:08You know, they don't like to announce business deals where there are important games being played.
02:12They don't want to take the spotlight off of the field.
02:15But basically, you've got ESPN will still be a part of the baseball package.
02:18They'll be licensing MLB TV, the out-of-market games, which is good for streaming.
02:25They've got the rights to some local games, the Guardians, the Padres, the Twins, the Diamondbacks, the Rockies.
02:31They've also got a package of midweek games that they'll be able to fill in their schedule with.
02:37Now, who's jumping in is NBC Sports.
02:39NBC Sports wants to have a live game every Sunday night around the year.
02:46They've got the NBA starting up in a couple of weeks, and next season they're going to have a Sunday night baseball game over the course of the summer.
02:53They're also going to have some wild-card playoff games.
02:56They're paying $200 million for that stuff.
02:59And then last but not least, you've got the guys at Netflix jumping.
03:02And Netflix has been sort of like dipping their toe into the sports water, and they're going to be doing Home Run Derby, which is sort of good for Netflix.
03:10They like to have a singular event, not necessarily weekly series, just sort of figuring out how sports works on Netflix.
03:17They've been ramping up their advertising, and sports is good because you've got natural breaks in advertising.
03:22Nobody complains when there's a commercial between innings in a baseball game or when there's a timeout in a football game or when, you know, batters are changing in a Home Run Derby.
03:32So that's good.
03:33So Netflix is in there, and it gives baseball a bigger opportunity to check out what it's doing in terms of streaming.
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