MLB Wants Control of Local TV Broadcasts

Before baseball commissioner Rob Manfred can enact his plan to reshape the sport’s television landscape, he’s going to have to clear one major hurdle: the big-market teams.

As The Athletic reported last week, Manfred is pushing for Major League Baseball’s central office to take control of local team broadcast rights so it can sell more inventory nationally come 2028. That’s the year MLB’s national broadcast deals expire, and when MLB hopes deep-pocketed streaming companies scoop up more games than they feature today.

But Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner, whose local media rights dwarf the value of most other teams’ — and who already has a deal with Amazon’s Prime Video to broadcast Yankees games — wants clubs to be able to choose whether they’re in or out.

“We’ve had discussions with Rob in the past,” Steinbrenner said last week at MLB headquarters when asked about Manfred’s plan. “He knows my take, which is that at the very least, it needs to be an optional thing, but I’m gonna leave it at that. But we’ve got a good board of directors at the YES Network, and we’ve got a good network, and we’re doing pretty good right now.”

The YES Network, the regional sports station partially owned by the Yankees, televised 125 of the Yankees’ 162 regular-season games in 2024. Almost all were exclusive telecasts: most of the time, no other national MLB partner like Fox simultaneously carried the game. YES and the Yankees are under contract through 2042.  Another 21 games in 2024 were carried exclusively by Amazon, which owns a piece of YES.

Under Manfred’s plan, the number of games available for YES — or any team’s typical broadcasting partner — would likely drop. Instead, more games would be televised exclusively by the streaming company that wins the bidding for a given package.

Why couldn’t the games be available both via the national package and YES at the same time? It’s technically possible, were all the parties to agree, just unlikely. Streaming companies will pay more if fans have to sign up for their service to get the games, and Manfred has a big-dollar blueprint in mind.