Regardless of how the talks play out, ESPN’s next deal with Major League Baseball won’t look anything like the one it just walked away from. But that doesn’t mean the network’s baseball coverage is disappearing.

Jimmy Pitaro confirmed as much this week, telling The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis that ESPN is open to re-engaging with MLB after opting out of its previous rights agreement.

“Yes, we would,” Pitaro said during a recent appearance on The Press Box. “Look, going back to my point before about operating with discipline, the deal that we had didn’t make sense for us. And so, there was a mutual opt-out. We elected to opt out. But at the time, I made it very clear to Commissioner [Rob] Manfred that we love the game of baseball and we wanted to figure something out with them, you know, stay in the game, continue or coverage. We expressed to them at the time our interest in local.

“Just to back up here, we see ESPN as the front door, the starting point for sports fans. We believe that – and I’ve said this publicly several times — that we can be part of the solution in terms of local games. We know that the RSNs are struggling these days, and we want to be part of a solution there. And so, yes, we absolutely want to figure something out with baseball. And we remain in conversations with them. And there’s a very healthy dialogue happening right now.”

That “mutual opt-out” was a key inflection point. ESPN’s most recent MLB package had already scaled back to nearly one game per week — Sunday Night Baseball — plus the Home Run Derby and early-round playoff coverage. Opting out wasn’t about abandoning baseball altogether, but rather stepping away from a rights deal that no longer fit ESPN’s cost structure.

In the meantime, Sunday Night Baseball has quietly been delivering solid numbers, with year-over-year ratings growth. That success explains why ESPN still sees value in MLB, even if the broader package changes. The challenge is finding a rights setup that aligns with how fans actually consume games in 2025. and how the network wants to allocate resources in an era dominated by the NFL, NBA, college football, and now the WWE.

Pitaro’s mention of local rights is telling. With regional sports networks in flux and MLB exploring alternative distribution models, ESPN sees a possible role in bridging national and local coverage. It’s not clear what that would look like, whether it’s streaming, linear carriage, or a hybrid, but it hints at a more flexible, targeted approach rather than the traditional “pay for everything” model.

For now, both sides are still talking. MLB has been willing to split packages among multiple partners — NBC and Apple are reportedly interested in national games — and Pitaro’s comments suggest ESPN is open to being one piece of that puzzle rather than the whole picture.

Whether that means Sunday nights remain exclusive to ESPN or the network experiments with a local/national hybrid, the takeaway seems more and more likely that baseball probably isn’t leaving Bristol anytime soon. It just might look a lot different when it returns.