ESPN to Replace Sunday Night Baseball with 'Women's Sports Sundays'

In a move highly unlikely to succeed, ESPN has announced it intends to replace Sunday Night Baseball with Women’s Sports Sunday, Variety reported.

ESPN plans to feature the WNBA, the National Women’s Soccer League, women’s college basketball, softball, and all things women’s sports.

The network made the move official on Thursday.

“The move follows ESPN’s near-breakup with Major League Baseball,” Front Office Sports’ Michael McCarthy wrote. “The longtime business partners mutually agreed to opt out of their seven-year, $550 million rights deal three seasons early last February.  They later came together with a reworked deal that includes a national 30-game midweek package and the rights to sell and distribute MLB.TV’s out-of-market streaming service. ESPN is paying roughly the same for its new deal at $550 million annually.”

ESPN sees the end of its deal with MLB as an opportunity to push women’s sports to the forefront.

“Sunday is a day of the week when we see a ton of our best women’s sports programming, and we will have events outside of our primetime window,” said Susie Piotrkowski, vice president of women’s sports programming. “We saw an opportunity to have access in what I would call women’s sports season, the summer months. This was an opportunity to be intentional and make sure our most premium women’s sports properties [were shown regularly].”

For those of you thinking that this is surely some woke experiment that the network will soon walk away from, think again. ESPN’s Executive Vice President of Programming & Acquisitions, Rosalyn Durant, says the new women’s sports feature is here to stay.

“It is a flag in the ground, and a continuing commitment,” she said.

“We are setting in an expectation,” Durant continued. “We want it to be a mainstay and part of a sports fan’s plans.” Durant believes Women’s Sports Sunday will be successful because, as she puts it, fans are less focused on whether men or women are playing and more interested in the quality of the games.

There may be a hint of truth to that when it comes to Caitlin Clark. However, Clark only plays 44 games a year and, as we saw last year, sometimes not nearly that many as the second-year player encountered a slew of injuries that sidelined her for most of the season. Moreover, Clark also wasn’t as good in her sophomore season as she had been the year before.

For these reasons, and others, building an entire permanent network block around one person is an extremely foolish decision. Of course, ESPN will counter by saying they are not building it around Clark. Which, of course, is even more foolish, as she’s the only female athlete in America who possesses instant name or face recognition among the vast majority of sports fans.

Oh, and then there’s the fact that the WNBA and the players’ union are currently locked in a contract dispute that shows no sign of being resolved soon and may in fact not be resolved before the start of the season.

Fans on X were quick to ridicule ESPN for its decision.

NBC Sunday Night Baseball will air its first game on March 26.