Boston Red Sox
The national media rights deal is changing, and different subscriptions will be required if you don’t want to miss a single Red Sox game in 2026 and beyond.
Here’s the good news: The Red Sox have just one remaining regular-season game that will be carried on a channel or streaming service other than NESN.
On Friday, the first game of three with the Tigers to wrap up the regular season will be found on Apple TV+. Everything else will be with Tom Caron and friends.
As for the bad news, well, it’s really not that bad. It’s just a reminder that we’re going to have to figure out this where-to-watch and how-much-do-I-have-to-pay? stuff all over again next season, with the national media rights deal changing and different subscriptions required if you don’t want to miss a single Red Sox game.
Earlier this week, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred confirmed previous reports that national rights agreements were close to being finalized with three media partners, two of which are new, for the 2026-28 seasons.
ESPN is the returner, though it looked for a few months like the network was on its way out of the MLB business. In Feburary, it opted out of its deal with MLB, which included Sunday Night Baseball and the Home Run Derby, citing “fiscal responsibility.” ESPN paid $550 million per season for that deal.
But ESPN and MLB need each other and apparently knew it. Negotiations, according to Manfred, picked up again in June.
ESPN’s pending package, which will include midweek games, in-market local rights for five teams, and rights to license MLB.tv, will presumably be more financially palatable and provides more content for ESPN’s recently launched direct-to-consumer app ($29.99 per month).
Manfred confirmed the new partners will be Netflix ($17.99 per month on its standard ad-free service), which will gain the Home Run Derby, and Comcast’s NBCUniversal, which will take over Sunday Night Baseball and have some wild-card games to disperse among NBC and its streaming service Peacock ($11.99 a month).
Peacock also is expected to be the new home for the Friday night package currently on Apple TV+, which reportedly is exercising an early-opt out provision in its deal. And per Sports Business Journal’s Austin Karp, NBC is likely to take over the Sunday morning game package that currently belongs to Roku, with those games probably going to Peacock.
Got all of that, Red Sox fans? Don’t worry. We’ll revisit when the schedule comes out, and again when those assorted Fridays and Sundays come around and the Red Sox are somewhere other than NESN.
Taking AI-m at fake feeds
OK, rant time, because this has been driving me nuts for a while and really seems to have escalated in recent weeks.
Do all of you realize how much manipulative, fake-quote-laden, mistake-filled artificial intelligence slop populates Facebook feeds now? It’s pretty much everything that isn’t from people you know and follow.
I’m talking about those stories, posted by an account with an often-nonsensical name, that claim some athlete said something about or donated an enormous amount of money to one political cause or another. Sometimes they’re even positive stories that seem too good to be true, like some made-up tale, accompanied with hideous AI art, of some baseball star donating his whole salary to a homeless shelter.
If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. And if it seems like something might be using an athlete’s name to stir up tensions and generate clicks — like one completely made-up post I saw this week pretending that Mookie Betts had weighed in on one of the most divisive ongoing news stories of the moment — it definitely is.
That phony Betts post had 30,000 comments, most of them taking it at face value. Media literacy in this country is in a ditch, but healthy skepticism shouldn’t be too much to ask. Please check an actual source before sharing something you see and maybe even want to believe, but aren’t 100-percent certain is true. YANKEESHOTNEWS512 and such are not sources. They’re sludge.
Brady in good place for advance scouting
It’s hard to tell whether the NFL doesn’t give a hoot about Raiders minority owner/Fox broadcaster Tom Brady’s blatant conflict of interest, or just expects that we’ll eventually all look away from the hypocrisy and allow it to become the unquestioned norm for as long as he’s in the booth.
If NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and his assorted underlings are counting on the latter, it’s not happening in the next couple of weeks, that’s for sure. Brady — the color analyst on Fox’s Chiefs-Eagles game last Sunday before showing up in the Raiders’ coaching booth Monday night and wearing a headset for their matchup with the Chargers — has an interesting scheduling quirk straight ahead.
He’ll join Kevin Burkhardt on Fox’s Cowboys-Bears broadcast Sunday … an excellent chance for him to do some advance scouting and digging for intel before his Raiders play the Bears on Sept. 28.
Unlike last year, Brady is allowed to take part virtually in production meetings with coaches and players this season.
Given that he’s clearly heavily involved with the Raiders operation — ESPN’s Peter Schrager reported that he talks to offensive coordinator Chip Kelly two or three times per week — it’s foolish to believe he doesn’t gain at least an incremental benefit from working a Bears game the week before his team plays them.
And as Brady can tell you better than most, incremental benefits can make all the difference in the NFL.
Amazon Prime joins Masters coverage
When the Masters rolls around next spring, Amazon Prime will be in on coverage of golf’s first major of the season. It will stream two hours of the first and second rounds on April 9 and 10. The coverage each day precedes ESPN’s broadcasts from Augusta National.
Paramount+ will stream two hours of the third and fourth rounds before CBS closes out those days.
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