MLB Is Planning on Stealing Another Sport from Its Fans

By Jennifer Asencio
| Published 19 seconds ago

Over the winter, football fans hoping to tune into the NFL’s traditional Christmas Day games on television were disappointed unless they had Netflix. The NFL postseason was also relegated to streaming, with viewers needing no fewer than seven subscription services to be able to follow all the action.

This led to widespread fan dissatisfaction. Now, it looks like Major League Baseball is poised to do something similar.

Last baseball season, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred revealed plans to acquire the local broadcasting rights from all the regional sports networks that air baseball games and package them into a single deal with a single network. Manfred predicted he could get all the teams on board with this plan by 2028. These plans were understated until they were reported by coverage of the San Francisco Giants in January 2026.

MLB already controls the national rights, and in the past, this meant games were broadcast on cable channels like ESPN or TBS. Much of the postseason is usually on FS1, and the World Series is aired on Fox. But local games always appeared on local networks, like the Yankees’ YES, the Mets’ SNY, the Dodgers’ SportsNet LA, or San Francisco’s NBC Sports Bay Area. Manfred’s plan would mean even those broadcasts would fly under a single banner.

Smaller teams have deals with local cable affiliate networks like Bally Sports and FanDuel, the latter of which has been facing significant financial upheaval in recent years, despite also broadcasting NBA games. But larger teams have financial stakes in their networks, and all the teams manage their own commentators, who are usually local celebrity institutions and famous past players. This plan seems to both nationalize and homogenize local baseball broadcasting, taking much of the game’s flavor away from fans of each team.

SNY contributed to a symptom of this when it parted ways with Mets broadcast director John DeMarsico. Although controversial rumors spread about the “real” reasons for his departure, the official reason given by both his social media account and SNY is that he was let go over “creative differences.”

The reason this is significant, even if the rumors are true, is that DeMarsico branded his work with the hashtag #Baseballiscinema because he wove the narrative of Mets games using cinematic techniques like fades and split screens that were inspired by movies. He would often share clips of himself and his crew using these techniques, showcasing them alongside the movie scenes that inspired them, from classics such as Kill Bill, Apocalypse Now, and Raging Bull.

These things made DeMarsico’s broadcasts very distinctive from the others. He turned baseball broadcasts into an art, which doesn’t seem to fit into the MLB Commissioner’s plan. The rumors about his departure were spread anonymously on social media, but were of a high-profile nature that usually doesn’t remain anonymous.

I investigated these rumors myself but could find no reputable sources to confirm them or connect them to his professional life, so they do not bear repeating. However, they served to justify his departure as something separate from MLB and even from SNY, at least in public opinion.

Nevertheless, it is interesting that the only creative broadcast in MLB, on one of the few networks that can show any resistance to Manfred’s plan, is no longer part of the industry at a time when Manfred is predicting he can package all the local broadcasts within only a few more seasons. The Wilpons, who own SNY, have long been known to Mets fans as enthusiastic supporters of the MLB corporate machine, even to the detriment of their own team, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the official reason had more truth to it than some unsubstantiated scandalous rumors. Mets spring training broadcasts so far look just like everyone else’s, but the official baseball season doesn’t start until March 25, 2026, so we’ll have to see what the regular season broadcasts look like.

No matter what the situation at SNY, the fact remains that baseball fans are in danger of having their teams being siloed behind yet another subscription service. Games that would have normally been available locally are going to be homogenized into a packaged blob, and there’s no guarantee the network they are sold to will be a TV network. The NBA, NFL, and Major League Soccer have already made similar moves, and now it looks like it’s going to be baseball’s turn before long, and MLB is already paving the way.