San Francisco Giants mascot Lou Seal waves a flag to celebrate a win against the Chicago Cubs in a MLB game on Aug. 27, 2025, at Oracle Park in San Francisco.

San Francisco Giants television broadcasts could look incredibly different in the very near future. 

For the vast majority of the 2,430 regular season MLB games, each team controls its local television rights and airs games on its home network. For the Giants, that has been NBC Sports Bay Area (and its previous iterations) for a few decades now. 

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But MLB controls the national television broadcast deals, which include some regular season games and the entire postseason. Earlier this offseason, MLB announced some reshaped national television deals, including Netflix broadcasting the Giants’ season-opener against the Yankees at Oracle Park on March 25, 2026. Those new deals, as well as all of MLB’s existing ones, expire in 2028. 

That means that MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has an opportunity to change things dramatically. This past semester, in the final few weeks of the MLB regular season, Manfred sat down for an interview with Front Office Sports reporter Eric Fisher at the outlet’s Tuned In summit in New York. In a wide-ranging conversation, Manfred said he has bold plans for the end of the 2028 season: pooling the 30 teams’ local television rights and selling them off as one.

“If you do national deals and a certain number of games are included, the games that are left over, if there’s a centralized approach there, it’s a lot easier to get into a world where a fan has a reduced number of places to look for a particular game,” Manfred said at the Sept. 16 summit, later adding he........

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