Opening Day Thursday could be the calm before the storm for Major League Baseball.
The league’s collective bargaining agreement with its players expires at the end of this season. The owners, with the support of the commissioner, are almost certain to push for a salary cap (which would likely be accompanied by a salary floor to bring players to the bargaining table).
MLB owners have never been able to get a cap passed by the players’ union. It’s unclear whether the end of the 2026 season will lead to a different outcome, but MLB Players Association interim executive director Bruce Meyer told ESPN last month that he expects a lockout to be “almost guaranteed.”
In addition to the expiration of the CBA, major changes are afoot regarding baseball media rights. A third of the league’s teams had not reached local television deals for this season until this week.
Nine MLB teams – the Washington Nationals, Seattle Mariners, Milwaukee Brewers, St. Louis Cardinals, Miami Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays, Cincinnati Reds, Kansas City Royals and Detroit Tigers – announced Wednesday that their all-new MLB-operated team channels will be carried by DirecTV.
Most of these teams were previously part of Main Street Sports (formerly Diamond Sports Group), which operates FanDuel Sports Networks (formerly Bally Sports). That entity is on the brink of liquidation and teams terminated their contracts with the company due to missed payments earlier this year.
A 10th team, the Atlanta Braves, is launching a new network called BravesVision. The Braves and Charter Spectrum announced a multi-year distribution deal earlier this week.
Ideally, MLB wants to secure the rights to all 30 teams under its control by the end of the 2028 season so it can sell local games on the market as a national package to a streamer. It would become the modern replacement for regional sports networks, and it would likely be a coveted new package for streaming services like ESPN and Amazon Prime Video.
Also at the end of the 2028 season, MLB’s national media rights for all of its packages will expire, allowing the league to redistribute games to its partners and potentially select new ones.
NBC, ESPN, Fox and CBS/Turner have dominated national rights over the past few decades.
“The key in media negotiations now is to have all your rights,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told me last year. “If you have all your content – all your playoffs, all your regular season – available, there will be buyers, and I’m confident there will be buyers at a higher price for us.”
Manfred even floated the idea of expanding the league to 32 teams and realigning the league geographically, upending or even eliminating the American and national leagues that have existed for over 100 years.
Television audiences on the rise
Of course, it’s unclear to what extent this hypothetical change will actually come to fruition.
But MLB’s transformative potential is greater than any other Big 4 professional league in the United States.
And yet, baseball is not in difficulty, quite the contrary. The implementation of the pitch clock in 2023 led to shorter games, increased attendance and higher television ratings.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, United States, July 9, 2025.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
More than 50 million people in the United States, Canada and Japan watched Game 7 of the World Series last year – the most-watched baseball game in 34 years. MLB recently concluded the World Baseball Classic – a global preseason tournament – which attracted nearly 11 million viewers on Fox and Fox Deportes for its final game.
MLB team valuations are up 13% from last year. The average MLB team is now worth $2.95 billion, according to data from CNBC Sport.
Yet the league’s profitability is in far worse shape than the NFL, NBA and NHL, according to CNBC calculations. In 2025, all 30 MLB teams had an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) margin of less than 2%. Average team revenue was $426 million with an average EBITDA of $7 million, including approximate non-MLB events. In contrast, the comparable margin for the NFL was 20%; the NBA, 21% and the NHL, 22%, according to the most recent valuations from CNBC.
The new CBA at the end of this season could be the first significant step toward a very different MLB. But, like the WNBA, which announced its new collective bargaining agreement earlier this week, MLB must ensure that negotiations to secure a new labor agreement do not jeopardize a wave of positive momentum.