When the season starts, current MLB.TV subscribers won’t notice a change. They’ll still be able to access games through the league’s app while paying $150 for the season. New customers, however, will have to sign up for MLB.TV through ESPN Unlimited, while existing ESPN Unlimited customers—including cable customers who can authenticate their Unlimited subscription for free—will be charged $135 for the season. The hitch is that new customers won’t need to continue subscribing to ESPN Unlimited to retain access to games—they’ll be able to access the central hub through ESPN Unlimited, but without all the other, non-baseball content. Obviously, it’s a confusing process (I thoroughly enjoyed Jacob Feldman’s breakdown) with some potential risk for Pitaro & Co.

Despite this strange loophole, there are some strong signs that fans who remain in the ESPN Unlimited ecosystem will stick around. League-specific services like MLB.TV, NBA League Pass, or MLS Season Pass aren’t perfect, but they’ve had encouraging trajectories in recent years. Sign-ups for league-specific services grew by 18 percent in Q3, which coincided with the start of the NFL, NHL, and NBA seasons. According to Antenna, MLB.TV accounted for just under 60 percent of all sports-centric streaming signups in Q2. These subscribers are some of the most loyal and engaged viewers in the entire streaming universe, with relatively normalized churn, according to Antenna.

Meanwhile, MLB viewership was up overall last season across broadcast and cable. Fox averaged around 2 million viewers per game, a year-over-year increase of just under 10 percent; ESPN notched a 21 percent increase, with 1.8 million viewers per game; and TNT Sports saw a 29 percent increase for its non-exclusive games, averaging 462,000 viewers. The league has also had success with young viewers—the cohort Manfred is most excited about. Last season, viewership in the under-17 demo grew by double-digit percentages on Fox, ESPN, and TBS, while MLB Network logged a near 60 percent increase. However, young viewers are also the most likely to “churn and return,” with eight in 10 Gen Z subscribers saying they canceled a service after signing up for a specific title (not necessarily sports specific) within the past year due to either price or lack of use, according to a new report from Civic Science.

Manfred and his team need to keep up the momentum with this group, and reduce the friction involved with finding, watching, and paying for games. The bittersweet news is that while many R.S.N.s have collapsed—all nine MLB teams have terminated their contracts as of this preseason in the Main Street Sports debacle—the league has moved about half of its team’s feeds under its umbrella. And ESPN executives are surely hopeful that ESPN Unlimited could become home for all of those local feeds by the 2027 season. (Of course, having all of those games under one company banner could be flagged for potential monopolistic behavior; Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have already raised concerns about ESPN’s deal with the NFL and MLB over potential consumer harm.)

However, if consumers decide that accessing MLB.TV through ESPN becomes too costly or too annoying, Manfred and his team may have to deal with an increase in piracy (or piracy-adjacent) behavior—something that’s already afflicting the sport. Web searches for V.P.N. services that are able to bypass MLB.TV’s regional restrictions have spiked each year in March since 2021, according to data from Google Trends, and one survey found 64 percent of Millennials admitted to watching games via pirated streams.

But assuming ESPN’s partnership with MLB.TV does work out, it could create an opportunity for Pitaro & Co. to hoover up other leagues’ direct-to-consumer offerings. And that’s especially true if ESPN is eventually spun off from Disney—something Pitaro vehemently denied in his CNBC appearance, but a subject of renewed interest among analysts following the $30 billion valuation revealed in Disney’s most recent earnings report, and Josh D’Amaro’s appointment as C.E.O. In other words, there’s a hope that MLB.TV could be the prototype for what ESPN’s direct-to-consumer product becomes a decade from now.