MLB’s plan to take over local TV rights is a huge deal. Here’s why.

At a sports media conference this week, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred talked about the future of his sport’s local television rights, something he has talked about many times before.

Manfred has made clear for years, with increasing specificity in recent months, that he wants to pull broadcast rights from all 30 teams back under MLB control.

Doing so would allow MLB to market those rights to potential broadcast partners as a collection, rather than one team at a time. Without the exclusivity clauses accompanying 30 disparate cable deals, MLB could end local blackouts. It could also market those rights to networks or streaming services, such that MLB could secure a deal that generates more revenue collectively than with the sum of its 30 local parts.

Doing so would, therefore, change the current television model of MLB entirely. For that reason, it always felt like a far-off dream, one unlikely to materialize before Manfred’s stated retirement date of January 2029.

But this time, when asked whether he thought MLB would have control of all 30 teams’ local rights by 2028 — a date that is significant because that is when all of MLB’s existing national broadcast deals for postseason games and other major events will expire — Manfred talked about his vision with more certainty than he has before:

“If I had to guess today,” Manfred told an audience Tuesday at the Front Office Sports conference. “We would have the availability of all 30 clubs (by 2028).”

Importantly, Manfred did not have to offer a guess at all, which is why his willingness to do so feels significant.

As his sport has implemented significant on-field changes and navigated plummeting local cable revenue in the streaming era, Manfred has rarely floated things he was not certain would come to fruition. But prying local broadcast rights away from big-market teams, who in many cases have built their own lucrative networks around them, is as impenetrable a barrier as any that Manfred’s plans have yet encountered.

Even as the bankruptcy of the rights holder formerly known as Diamond Sports and other regional sports networks forced more than a third of MLB teams to truncate or renegotiate cable deals — in several cases, already surrendering the rights to MLB instead — the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, New York Mets, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Toronto Blue Jays and others fuel their industry-leading payrolls in large part with their local television revenue and cable deals that run through 2030 and beyond.

Surrendering control of those rights to MLB before those deals expire — and therefore throwing their earning ability in a shared pot with small-market teams such as the Pittsburgh Pirates or Cincinnati Reds — could cost them revenue. So beyond the appeal of financial security when their lengthy cable deals expire, it would seem none of those big-market behemoths have incentive to do it.

And therein lies the importance of Manfred’s confidence that he will secure those rights by 2028: It is not obvious how he would persuade teams such as the Dodgers and Yankees to surrender the revenue generator that has turned them into powerhouses.

Asked about this at the conference this week, Manfred was vague.

“The best I can do for you on that right now is to say we’re not going to centralize local media as a stand-alone deal,” he said. “There will have to be other gives and takes that make sense for all the clubs.”

Asked for more specifics, an MLB spokesperson deferred to the commissioner. But conversations in recent weeks with multiple executives from major market teams, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about the issue, offered some clarity on what it might take.

Any deal that would “make sense” for all clubs, for example, would probably have to include buying out networks such as the Cubs’ Marquee, the Dodgers’ SportsNet LA, the Mets’ SNY or the Yankees’ YES: big checks, cut by MLB, as if it were buying any other network. And one appeal of marketing the rights as a whole would be the financial security it offers big-market teams when their current cable deals expire — and they are thrust into what could by then be a nonexistent cable market looking to replace them.

But the major issue would be replacing the annual revenue those broadcast rights can secure, because it is unclear how teams would be compensated for them in a consolidated model. So the question then becomes, where could MLB find more revenue to help replace what those teams lose?

Here is where the seismic nature of such a shift becomes clear.

One way to offset that lost revenue, multiple team executives suggested, would be to stop asking major market teams to share 48% of their local revenue (which includes ticket sales, concessions and local television deals) with their smaller-market brethren.

Revenue sharing has long been MLB’s solution to payroll disparity, but some owners see it as a reason MLB teams have struggled to find robust interest from buyers while, for instance, NBA teams have not: The process takes money out of pockets and introduces cost uncertainty. Because the number payers pay and receivers receive changes year-to-year, teams are working around tens of millions of dollars of relative uncertainty each year.

But to do away with revenue sharing, which was introduced in 1996 after disagreements over a would-be salary cap cost baseball the 1994 postseason amid a lengthy work stoppage, MLB would need another method to ensure competitive balance between smaller- and larger-market teams. The most obvious method (insert dramatic music here): a salary cap.

A salary cap would not only appease big market teams by allowing MLB to reduce or do away with revenue sharing, it would also cap payroll costs. A salary cap, plus a major reduction in revenue sharing, therefore, would certainly make surrendering local broadcast rights more palatable.

But any changes to revenue sharing or the imposition of a salary cap must be collectively bargained. The current collective bargaining agreement ends after the 2026 season. Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that Manfred has been openly talking about the need for “economic reform” in interviews and even in clubhouses — some of which have been more polite about the suggestion than others.

And while Manfred’s owners have not yet decided whether they will push for a salary cap, according to multiple people familiar with their conversations, he has been making sure they are aware of the impact a cap could have on the value of their teams long-term.

At recent owners’ meetings, for example, MLB made presentations to owners about franchise valuations — presentations that included the importance of cost certainty belied by revenue sharing and promised by something like a cap, according to a person who saw them.

Now, of course, the Major League Baseball Players Association has made a decades-long mission of staving off a salary cap. Executive Director Tony Clark and his team have been escalating their opposition in anticipation of next year’s bargaining: At this year’s All-Star Game in July, for example, Clark called a salary cap “institutionalized collusion.” The only thing both sides agree on is that they are bracing for a work stoppage, in part because Manfred has already alluded to a lockout.

Importantly, the current collective bargaining agreement expires Dec. 1, 2026. Whenever a new one is negotiated, that deal would dictate the economic structure of MLB in 2028, when Manfred said he believes he can secure these rights. Certainly then, securing substantive change to baseball’s economic system in the next CBA would seem like a prerequisite to prying local broadcast rights away from teams who currently have no financial incentive to give them up.

But owners seem more certain this kind of structural economic change is necessary than the players’ union, which watched Juan Soto sign a contract for $765 million this past winter and is therefore unlikely to suddenly drop decades of opposition to a salary cap — even if it came with a salary floor that could force small-market teams to be more active with veteran players in free agency instead of relying on cheaper, younger players to fill out their rosters. If Manfred’s local rights consolidation is dependent, in part, on major changes to the CBA, he might need a backup plan.

Perhaps he has one. Perhaps the appeal of not having to wade back into a broken cable market when their current deals expire would be enticing enough to make big market teams consider a deal. No one on team sides seems entirely sure, and no MLB officials with authority to speak are willing to say.

But what is clear is that the consolidation of local television rights that was once a pipe dream has transformed into something that looks much more like a firm plan — and Manfred does not often share plans he does not have reason to believe he can execute.