With every new addition to Major League Baseball’s list of streaming and broadcasting partners in recent years, the response from baseball fans is largely the same:
Frustration that the league is raking in more TV money while creating another expensive and confusing barrier between fans and the game.
ESPN wants baseball fans to understand that their renewed and revamped partnership with MLB, which includes running MLB.TV, is different.
For starters, there’s no need to learn a new streaming service. Though MLB.TV is now available on the ESPN app, it remains accessible through the usual MLB platforms and websites.
“(MLB.TV) has been really a leader, really, in streaming, streaming innovation and streaming quality for over two decades,” John Lasker, senior vice president of ESPN Direct-to-Consumer, told the Herald. “Integrating a product like that into ESPN … was not something we or Major League Baseball took lightly.”
Lasker described ESPN as an addition or “touch-point” to MLB.TV, rather than a takeover. While streaming remains the same on MLB platforms, fans who choose to tune in on ESPN platforms can enjoy a different set of features and functionality, including integrations for fantasy, betting, and statistics, and “Stream Center,” an app-to-app linking between mobile devices and connected televisions. The multi-view experience lets viewers watch up to four ESPN games simultaneously, baseball or otherwise.
“It’s not like we’re taking the MLB.TV product and just dropping it into ESPN,” Lasker said. “It’s sort of being built, the ESPN version of it, is sort of being built from the ground up.”
In addition to “Baseball Tonight” and 30 exclusive games that will air on ESPN and ABC, the ESPN app is now home to 2,000 out-of-market games. With ESPN Unlimited, the content options are virtually endless; Red Sox fans will note that MLB’s official 2004 World Series film is among them.
Sunday Night Baseball, a cornerstone of ESPN and MLB’s partnership since its inception in 1990, is absent from this new chapter. While NBCUniversal takes over SNB as part of their renewed covenant with the league, ESPN will compile their exclusive season slate from a wider offering.
“I think this has been recognized as certainly a shift, but a shift in the positive direction,” Lasker said of losing SNB. “(It) represents our desire really to create flexibility and accessibility, and just enhance experiences for all sports fans.”
“What we have now is more flexibility, so we can select games based on games, not based on window,” Ashley O’Connor, ESPN’s vice president of programming and acquisitions, told the Herald. “It makes it even easier, because you can watch those games plus MLB.TV all in one place, and that allows kind of a one-stop shop for baseball fans.”
To streamline their “one-stop shop,” ESPN and MLB have made it simple to link preexisting accounts. And most importantly, the cost of a seasonal or monthly MLB.TV subscription for 2026 is unchanged from what the league charged the last two years: $149.99 or $29.99 per month.
The only difference is an extra step in the sign-up process. In order to purchase a new MLB.TV subscription, users must have or sign up for ESPN Unlimited, which begins with a one-month free trial, then auto-renews at $29.99 per month. However, once subscribed to MLB.TV, users may cancel ESPN Unlimited at any time. (Existing ESPN Unlimited subscribers can sign up for MLB.TV at a discounted rate of $134.99 for the 2026 season.)
Beginning in 2027, ESPN’s offerings will expand further, to include local games for select teams that have distribution deals with MLB. In the meantime, ESPN’s “Where to Watch” feature will help fans of every sport find any game in the world, even if it means directing them to another platform.
“The sort of fractured nature of where sports are,” Lasker continued. “That is part of what we’re trying to solve here.
“We want ESPN to be a source of record and service, so that you can open up the ESPN app and we can solve that problem for you. If we’re not able to give you the game, because we don’t have the rights to distribute it to you, we tell you where to go. … We believe that’s a burden that we should be carrying to help serve fans the way we’re expected to.”
“I think people know that we love baseball as a company,” O’Connor said, “and that we’re going to continue to do baseball right.”
