Major League Baseball is riding a wave of momentum with three years of attendance gains, soaring TV ratings, a crop of young stars and expanded global appeal. The 2023 rule changes to speed up the game have received near universal acclaim.

Yet, the sport also faces an existential crisis, with a three-headed monster of intertwined issues in revenue disparity, the future of media distribution and a looming labor crisis that hardliners warn will cancel the 2027 season.

Investors recognize the choppy waters ahead for MLB but are increasingly betting on the long-term economic prospects of the sport, as witnessed by a series of control and LP transactions during the past 12 months. That helped push the average franchise value up 12% to $3.17 billion, based on conversations with team executives, bankers, lawyers and investors familiar with team transactions. It is the biggest year-over-year franchise value gain for MLB since Sportico’s baseball valuations launched in 2021, as investors see the value proposition baseball offers relative to other sports team prices.

The one-year gain still trails the recent increases in the other major sports leagues; the NFL ($7.1 billion average) and NBA ($5.5 billion) are both up 20%, and the NHL ($2.1 billion) rose 17%. The WNBA ($269 million) and NWSL ($184 million) are in a very different growth stage, with 180% and 77% gains, respectively.

The New York Yankees are No. 1 for the sixth straight year at $9.4 billion, including their stake in the YES Network and other related business. It is a 12% gain, but the Dodgers continue to narrow the gap behind them, with their value up 17% to $9.05 billion—the Yankees’ value was 46% higher than the Dodgers in 2021, and the difference is now just 4%.

Rounding out the top five are the Boston Red Sox ($6.65 billion), Chicago Cubs ($6.48 billion) and San Francisco Giants ($4.36 billion). These estimates are based on a control transaction versus an LP deal. The 30 teams are collectively worth $95 billion, including real estate and related businesses, such as The Battery in Atlanta.

Click for a ranking of all 30 teams or a data visualization comparing MLB teams to other pro sports franchises.

MLB Economics

MLB teams generated an estimated $13.1 billion last year, including non-MLB revenue where team owners operate or own the stadiums. It was up only 3% from the prior year, as the trouble at RSNs dinged overall growth. Big market teams, such as the Yankees and Red Sox, continue to earn hefty rights fees, but financial troubles at what is now Main Street Sports cut local media revenue for many clubs in the bottom half of the valuations table. Overall local cable revenue for the 30 clubs fell roughly 10% in 2025.

Team sponsorships was the best performing major revenue category for last year, rising an estimated 10% to $1.8 billion. Ticketing and national revenue both rose low single-digit percentages.

Baseball was the sport most reliant on RSN rights fees, so teams have been significantly impacted by the meltdown. RSNs were built on the backs of MLB’s massive inventory of 162 games per club. Cable revenue represented 23% of team revenue in 2021 but fell to 16% last year.

The markets that lost their cable deals have been buffered to a degree by MLB’s revenue-sharing system. The transfer of revenue to small clubs has skyrocketed in recent years, with $630 million paid out by the top clubs last year, up from $550 million. The Miami Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays and Athletics had the three lowest attendances in the sport and all received roughly $75 million. The Chicago White Sox had the fourth-lowest attendance but are disqualified from receiving revenue-sharing proceeds based on their big-market status, which puts them at the bottom of MLB’s revenue rankings.

Small market teams also benefitted from spending by the richest franchises—nine teams paid $403 million in luxury tax penalties last season, led by the Dodgers at $169 million. Half of that money is distributed to the 21 clubs that did not exceed the competitive balance tax (CBT). The revenue sharing and CBT payouts mean that most small market clubs turned a profit, while several big market clubs, including the Mets and Phillies, were deep in the red.

The Dodgers, who kicked in about $175 million last year towards revenue sharing, will be on the hook for more than $200 million in 2026, based on the formula that factors in the most recent three years of revenue. The team generated gross revenue of $1.1 billion last year, a threshold previously only hit by the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys and LaLiga’s Real Madrid among sports teams. Shohei Ohtani, who has won NL MVP the last two years and led the team to back-to-back World Series wins, has boosted the club’s sponsorship revenue, which should top $200 million this year. Several of Ohtani’s personal sponsors, including Kowa and Kosé, are also team sponsors.

Attendance at Dodger Stadium was a team-record 4,012,470 fans last year, with 46 crowds of 50,000 or better. They were the first team to draw 4 million since the Mets and Yankees both did so in 2008, the final season in their old ballparks. The Colorado Rockies hold the record at 4.5 million from their inaugural season in 1993, when they played at Mile High Stadium.

The Dodgers’ value is up $5 billion since 2022.

The Toronto Blue Jays fell to the Dodgers in the World Series last year, but otherwise, the season was a home run for the club owned by Rogers Communications. A multiyear $300 million privately funded renovation of the Rogers Centre modernized the venue with upgraded seating and sponsorship opportunities.

Toronto’s attendance rose 6% last year, and the World Series run pushed net revenue to an estimated $570 million and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $30 million. The Jays can’t count on 10 home playoff games each year, but the success is fueling strong business ahead of the 2026 season. The Blue Jays’ value is up 21% to $2.9 billion.

Team Sales

Last year, the Rays were sold to a group led by Jacksonville, Fla., developer Patrick Zalupski for $1.7 billion in a story Sportico originally broke. It was only the second MLB control sale since 2020 after David Rubenstein’s group paid $1.73 billion for the Orioles in 2024. The Rays’ deal was at a 26% premium to Sportico’s 2025 valuation, which was dented after a hurricane damaged Tropicana Field and forced the team to play home games in 2025 at Steinbrenner Field, the Yankees’ spring training home.

The pace of MLB team sales has been slowed in part by the troubled RSN market. The Los Angeles Angels, Minnesota Twins and Washington Nationals each hired a bank to sell the franchise but didn’t complete a control deal—the Twins ended up selling LP stakes last year at a $1.75 billion valuation.

However, the sport is on the verge of a record sale. The San Diego Padres’ owners announced the team was for sale in November, during a legal battle between family members of late owner Peter Seidler, who died in 2023. Those legal concerns have since been settled, and San Diego represents an attractive market. The Padres finished 2025 behind only the Dodgers in attendance with 3.4 million fans, and they are also the only team in the four biggest North American sports leagues in the San Diego area after the Chargers moved to Los Angeles.

The team is expected to fetch more than $3 billion, and multiple billionaires have made initial bids, including Clearlake Capital co-founder José E. Feliciano, Everton and AS Roma owner Dan Friedkin and Golden State Warriors managing partner Joe Lacob. Final bids are expected next month.

The Chicago White Sox are in a multiyear process for Justin Ishbia to buy the team. In June, Ishbia reached an agreement with owner Jerry Reinsdorf that can give him control as soon as 2029 and provides the option to buy after 2034. Reinsdorf is MLB’s second-longest tenured owner after the Steinbrenner family.

“This is an investment in the future of the Chicago White Sox, and I am excited for the opportunity to deepen my commitment to the city and the team,” Ishbia told Sportico at the time. Justin and his brother, Mat, first invested in the team in 2021.

There have also been a bevy of LP stake sales since the start of 2025. Private equity giant Sixth Street bought 10% of the San Francisco Giants last year, while PE firm Sportsology Capital Partners recently invested in the Texas Rangers. These sales marked the first institutional funds besides Arctos Partners to buy equity stakes in MLB. Arctos’ MLB portfolio features six MLB teams, including the Dodgers, Red Sox, Cubs, Giants, Astros and Padres. Those franchises all rank among the top 10 in baseball.

The Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers and St. Louis Cardinals each completed transactions in 2025 at formidable valuations, with the Royals at $1.8 billion, Brewers $2.25 billion and Cardinals $2.85 billion.

What’s Next

There is optimism that baseball can solve its labor and revenue disparity problems without the nuclear option of a full season of lost games, which would also be a brutal way to enter media negotiations for pacts to start in 2029 that ideally will also transform baseball’s economic model. It has triggered an uptick in revenue multiples—the basic metric most bankers and owners use to value teams—that have fallen well behind other sports leagues.

The average MLB team is now worth 7.2x revenue, up from 6.6x a year ago. But there is a massive range in the sport—the Marlins are at the bottom with 4.5x, the Yankees are at the top with 10.5x and the median is 6.2x. And despite the uptick in overall MLB multiples, it still lags NBA (13.5x), NFL (10.3x), MLS (9.2x) and NHL (8.4x). MLB team values are up 39% during the past four years, same as MLS, but well behind the doubling of team values in the NHL (124%), NBA (113%) and NFL (103%).

Baseball teams are widely viewed as good value right now, but the next 24 months are crucial for the league. Commissioner Rob Manfred’s negotiating skills will be tested as he navigates baseball’s structural problems, which has the Dodgers generating 8x the local gross revenue of the Marlins before revenue sharing.