Does MLB need traditional TV more than it's willing to admit?

It's impossible to know who exactly pulled the trigger on the clause allowing ESPN to escape the three remaining years of its broadcast deal with Major League Baseball.

Last week, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred called the decision to end the contract after the 2025 season "mutual," and indicated the league was unhappy with ESPN's lack of baseball coverage outside the games themselves. Canceling a deal that paid MLB $550 million annually because there wasn't enough baseball chatter on "First Take" or "Around the Horn" sounded strangely petty, but reports since suggest it was ESPN that made the call, which is more logical: the broadcaster would know whether it was getting good value for a costly package that includes Sunday Night Baseball.

ESPN radio voice Boog Sciambi has since said the opt-out clause only existed in the contract because MLB wanted it there. Whoops.

Whatever the actual machinations, a decision that sounds like just another squabble over rights fees could end up being a seminal moment in the baseball broadcast landscape - and a shock to MLB's economic structure.

The steep increases in franchise valuations and player salaries in recent decades across North American sports have been driven by TV money, and mostly broadcast money, where consumers subscribe to a TV package that includes channels showing their local teams plus national coverage. The bonus with that system is that it delivered passive viewers, both people who subscribed to sports channels because they were part of a package but didn't watch them, and people who sometimes watched sports because they happened to be on.

But that model is changing rapidly. Regional sports channels in the U.S. have collapsed as cable subscriptions have plummeted, and national broadcasters have seen sharp viewership drops.

Filling the void, theoretically, will be digital platforms, streaming services like Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video, or direct-to-consumer options that already exist like MLB's digital subscription service. But consumers are much more aware of what they pay for these services - the monthly fees are higher, and they aren't buried in a larger TV bundle - and it's hard to know how many casual baseball fans would pay a specific fee for MLB coverage.

It's worth noting here that the NFL is on an island. It's moved games to Prime Video, Peacock, Netflix, and other non-traditional platforms and football fans chase them all over the broadcast spectrum. The NFL's such a beast that it could announce games on MySpace or Napster and everyone would be scrambling to remember their old passwords.

It's much less clear that any other sport would retain such an audience in a digital-only world, where the experiments are still relatively new. Rogers sold its Monday NHL games to Amazon in Canada, but neither the NHL or Prime Video have said anything about viewership, which is notable in itself. Apple launched a Friday Night Baseball package three years ago, and while that company is famously secretive about everything, there's no indication baseball fans flocked to the service.

Apple went one bigger in buying up global broadcast rights for MLS two years ago, but that deal's been widely panned by soccer fans who just want to watch their local club and have no interest in a league-wide service. Ratings for the MLS Cup, which aired on Fox in November, also dropped by almost 50% on the network from 2023, despite being a game between teams from New York and Los Angeles. It's an open question whether moving most MLS games to a niche service has hurt the league's casual fandom.

This is the environment in which MLB is considering its future. There's little doubt big-market teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Mets would manage with a smaller amount of national TV revenue since they already have large local deals, but a considerable number of teams - at least a dozen, probably more - would have a gaping budget hole without the $18 million they currently get from the ESPN contract. Add in the fact many of those same teams are facing uncertainty about local TV revenues amid a shifting landscape and it's a potential nightmare scenario. What happens to the league's payrolls if a handful of big-market teams is bringing in most of the broadcast revenue? And would those same teams want to keep paying into a revenue-sharing system in such an environment?

Much is obviously unknown. But at the root of all this is an uncomfortable fact: MLB doesn't have the national interest it once did. People will still follow their local teams, and MLB can get good ratings for marquee events like last year's World Series, which happened to involve the league's two biggest markets, but a random regular-season game isn't must-watch TV for anyone without a rooting interest.

This gets to the big question in baseball's new world: will enough fans be willing to pay for it in a digital-only environment? Or will MLB soon find that it needs conventional TV more than it's willing to admit?

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.