ATLANTA — Orioles regular-season baseball, coming soon to … ESPN? NBC? Apple TV?
The future of Orioles game broadcasts is uncertain after they broke off their deal to carry the Washington Nationals on the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network after this season, and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said Tuesday that the league is hoping to acquire as many teams’ television rights as possible to package them in a new long-term broadcast deal by 2028.
“I think it’s very important, in fact, crucial that when we go to the market for our post-’28 deals, that we have the ability to say to our broadcast partners: We have all these rights, what have traditionally been our national, what have traditionally have been our local, let’s cut them up in a way that is the best in terms of reaching our fans and maximizing our revenue,” Manfred said in a news conference with the Baseball Writers Association of America.
“I think in an environment that’s as disrupted as the current media environment, that kind of flexibility is absolutely crucial.”
MLB is currently working on securing a temporary TV deal for 2026 to 2028 after ESPN exercised an opt-out in its deal that had the network paying the league about $550 million a year for the rights to “Sunday Night Baseball” games, the Home Run Derby and the wild-card round of the playoffs. Manfred said that despite setting an original deadline of Tuesday’s All-Star Game, he doesn’t “believe it’s going to be long” before a deal is reached.
After that, the next big question will be how MLB structures its broadcast deals in the long run. The league has already acquired the rights to five of its 30 teams in the fallout of the Diamond Sports Group bankruptcy, broadcasting their games on local cable channels and offering in-market single team streaming subscriptions through MLB.TV. With its other national TV deals with Turner and Fox also expiring after 2027, MLB will have a full arsenal of rights to offer.
“I see the MLB media operating of clubs as an interim arrangement to get us to 2028,” Manfred said. “It’s not a goal that I’m pursuing in and of itself. Rather, it is an interim step for clubs that we happen to provide the best alternative given what’s happened in the local markets.”
The addition of local broadcasts to that deal would be a significant boon for MLB. Last season, prime-time baseball was the No. 1 rated cable television program in 20 of the 25 major league cities across the U.S. The majority of those games were broadcast on the local channels that teams control their own rights to, with most having sold them to regional sports networks or started their own similar to MASN.
Baltimore’s settlement with the Nationals in March put an end to a lengthy, expensive saga that had been a thorn in the sides of both neighboring franchises. But while the Nationals are now free to pursue whatever broadcast partner they wish to carry their games beginning with the 2026 season, the Orioles also have to decide how to move forward with their own rights and where MASN fits into that strategy.
Despite the high ratings, local RSNs have declined in both value and revenue over the past decade. MASN just started offering a standalone streaming service this season, but the gradual audience shift from cable to digital viewership has sent ripples across the industry that MLB is still adapting to and charting a path forward to combat.
If Manfred gets the kind of flexibility he’s looking for, the solution could involve the Orioles joining in on the league’s larger broadcast package before the end of the decade.
Salary cap dialogue takes a sharp turn
Tony Clark, and the MLBPA as a whole, have fought vehemently against the institution of a salary cap for decades. But with both Manfred and several team owners, including the Orioles’ David Rubenstein, speaking in favor of bringing a cap to the negotiating table for the next collective bargaining agreement, Clark doubled down by calling it “institutionalized collusion.”
“A cap is not about any partnership,” the players union’s executive director said in his own news conference with the BBWAA on Tuesday. “A cap is not about growing the game. That’s not what a cap is about. As has been offered publicly, a cap is about franchise values and profits. That’s what a cap is about.”
Manfred said that he hasn’t pushed players directly to consider a salary cap but has broached discussions about fostering more “competitive balance” across the league.
“Literally, what I say to them is, I identify a problem in the [RSN] media business and explain to them that owners need to change that problem,” Manfred said. “I then identify a second problem, that we need to work together, and that is that our fans in a lot of our markets who feel like we have a competitive balance problem.”
The current CBA is set to expire Dec. 1, 2026, and talk of a lockout has already begun in league circles. It wouldn’t be the first time the salary cap issue caused a work stoppage, either. The 1994-95 strike was centered around a cap as well, and it forced the cancellation of the World Series that fall, lasting 232 days and causing lasting damage to the sport.
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