ESPN's "Baseball Tonight" will still air as a Sunday night countdown leading up to "SNB"ESPN IMAGES
ESPN last November was "gearing up to bring back daily baseball studio programming," but the net is "no longer considering such a move" as the MLB season draws closer, according to Ben Koo of AWFUL ANNOUNCING. ESPN's "Baseball Tonight" will "still air as it did" in '18 as a Sunday night countdown leading up to "SNB." ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro, a "known baseball fan, had internally conveyed an interest in bringing back the popular show beyond Sunday nights." But two developments led the net to "walk away" from the idea. One was the fact that MLB has "opted to let ESPN slide on a contractual obligation to have a certain amount of studio shows during each season." Meanwhile, ratings projections for baseball-specific programming on ESPN instead of "SportsCenter" only "reaffirmed the original decision that Baseball Tonight or other baseball-specific programming no longer made sense for the network as a daily program" (AWFULANNOUNCING.com, 1/28). In Philadelphia, Rob Tornoe notes despite their latest decision, ESPN has "made a lot of moves recently on the baseball front, most notably poaching Yahoo’s Jeff Passan to act as the baseball equivalent of football analyst Adam Schefter." The network has also "signed new contract extensions with several analysts," including Jessica Mendoza, Mark Teixeira and David Ross (PHILLY.com, 1/29).
