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Manfred acknowledges rumored broadcasting deals
Speaking at a Front Office Sports conference Tuesday, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred spoke up about the rumored broadcast deals that the league was working on with the likes of ESPN, NBC, and more. Awful Announcing has the details:
“We have, kind of, agreements in principle. We still have issues that need to be resolved. They are the agreements that have been reported publicly, and we hope to push them across the finish line.”
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ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro supported Manfred’s characterization of the deal’s progress earlier in the conference. “When I last spoke publicly, I said that conversations were healthy, and I would say, since then, we’ve made good progress,” Pitaro said. “I don’t want to go further than that, but we’ve certainly made good progress with Rob and his team.”
Cat officially out of the bag and all of that, but we still don’t have a sense of scale as far as numbers go. How much is licensing out MLB.tv in an exclusive deal with ESPN worth to the league? Is it a number big enough to offset fan concerns about needing to download yet another app, never mind potential cost concerns of having to, perhaps, pay for both ESPN’s app as well as access to MLB games? We don’t know the scope of all of this yet, but we do know that this is just how things are now. The rest will have to wait, but likely not for too much longer if both Pitaro and Manfred are out there in public discussing that the negotiations are happening at all, and that deals are just waiting to be finalized.
Like I was saying, the postseason is already too big
A couple of weeks back I looked at the existing playoff race — as well as some recent previous ones — as a reminder that (1) the league might try to expand the postseason again in the next round of bargaining in 2026, and (2) the postseason is already too big. Sometimes you write something like this and a team decides to immediately spite you by rattling off a bunch of wins in a row and making you regret sitting down to type, but thankfully, the Mets.
The Mets are 22-31 in the second half of the season. They haven’t posted a winning record in a month since May, when they were all of 15-12. They are currently 78-73, and lost eight games in a row in September before picking up wins in their last two contests. The Diamondbacks are just 1.5 games back of them for the final wild card — the Diamondbacks are two games over .500.
Another way to put this is that the Guardians are 79-71, and 2.5 games back of a wild card spot in the AL — that’s a better record than the Mets, and hoo boy they probably really should not by vying for a postseason spot, either, not when they have basically 1.5 hitters on the roster. It’s just not very exciting is all, especially since, as things currently stand, the Astros are fighting the Mariners for the AL West or the Red Sox for the third wild card, with Boston feeling pretty likely for one of those consolation prizes since they are still 2.5 games up on Cleveland.
The Mariners and Astros should be in a struggle for a single postseason spot, or at least a fight for a meaningful one. Instead, it barely matters who wins which, since they’re both low seeds with their records, and chances are good they’ll both be in the postseason with the streaky Guardians left out in the cold, anyway. More stakes, please, that’s all. Or at least not fewer stakes than what we’ve been left with.
The rest
My latest at Baseball Prospectus went up last week, on the true nature of the 4,000-hit club. As things stand, Pete Rose and Ty Cobb are the only recognized 4,000-hit players in MLB, with Ichiro Suzuki getting the nod depending on the source, too, given his joint time in MLB and NPB. However, there are way, way more 4,000-hit players in professional baseball than that, and the fact that those players got to that level means they have stories worth telling and learning.
I spoke with Sports Reference’s Adam Darowski at length about the research he and two others have been doing for years now on the subject, just in time for Robinson Canó to join the 4,000-hit club himself, with a bunch of hits in the Mexican League championship series. A sample, so you get the idea:
It’s important to recognize, too, for those who believe this is aiming to be some desecration of the record books, that this isn’t the point at all. As Darowski said, “This is just a different way of looking at 4,000 hits. I’m 100% willing to admit that not all hits here are created equal. Jesús Sommers (4,330 hits) is not better than Tony Gwynn (3,553 hits). So it’s less about changing the number and more about changing the perspective on the number.” There’s also the idea of recognition for these players, and for the fact that baseball exists outside of MLB’s purview. And it’s certainly worked to this point. “ If there’s recognition I’m looking for, it’s really just recognition for baseball that is played outside of the major leagues,” said Darowski. “Mostly, I just get really pumped when people respond to this data. It’s one of things where when people get it, they really get it. I got some nice compliments at SABR, like ‘It’s rare that I come to one of these conventions and hear about players I’ve never heard of, but this one did that.’”
At Retro XP, I’ve been covering the 30th anniversary of the Playstation in North America, with the latest a look at Descent. While this didn’t originally release on the PSX — that was an MS-DOS title — its true 3D nature and performance on the console was the opening I needed to discuss what changed with the Playstation itself: quality 3D hardware was suddenly affordable, and it was off to the races for Sony because of it.
Related: I contributed a couple of chapters to a Lost in Cult book, Joysticks to Haptics: A Visual History of Game Controllers that released earlier this year. I cited it in that piece above since I’d brought up Descent’s control scheme and gameplay in one of those chapters, but figured I’d say as much here, while pointing you to it. I don’t get paid more if you buy it or anything, but you should still check it out — these Lost in Cult books make a great gift, coffee table book or for your bookshelf or whatever it is your pals like to do with a visual tome featuring essays.
While we’re on the subject of the Playstation, last week’s Endless Mode column from me focused on a whole bunch of Playstation games that deserve a re-release in the present. This week’s piece will publish today, and is on a similar subject in a far different form — who’s ready to argue about the nature and purpose of a video game remake?
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