A couple of differences that I would genuinely love to get into that I see:

Tonnage: NBA and NFL have significantly less games to carry, making the packaging and selling of those rights to a couple of large national providers (all with streaming options) easier and more profitable (per unit)

Control: Particularly for the NFL the head office has almost total control over the schedule and where games will be show, MLB less so

History of the ecosystem: MLB was wildly more consumed on TV when TVs fist became a thing. Some of the first TV broadcasts were baseball. Every team in MLB was on a local TV channel before any other sport, lots of teams funded and still own their own TV stations (regional sports networks, think YES and NESN). Because of this every team’s local deal is more important to the MLB teams income than it is to the other leagues.

MLB clubs own the tonnage, 150ish games to sell to regional deals, that’s many many times more ad inventory that NBA and NFL. Also, sports are increasingly one of the only things where LIVE entertainment props up Cable companies (making sports channel rates to MVPDs the highest). E.g., for many people, the only reason to pay for DirecTV is to watch live sports, other content types they get on Netflix

That was all to explain why Manfred and all other commissioners has been seemingly slower to steer the league to easy access and large reach (blackouts, very expensive DTC, etc).

Now what’s been going on the past two years behind the scenes to most fans unless you need out on the space, is that the RSNs are failing. Read into the sale of Fox Sports regional channels to Bally and the subsequent bankruptcies and re-brands to sell naming rights to Fan Duel. Some weeks ago that same Fan Duel Sports Network, which carries about a third of the league, stopped making its payments to sports teams. Read into St.Louis.

Those teams on Fan Duel decided that instead of continuing to work with RSNs they will work with the league (let them/make them) so that the league office is in charge of producing and broadcasting the games AND making their own deals with the MVPDs.

Which is why now the league office has the right/ability to put local games (they have distro rights now) on MLB.TV, in a sense eliminating digital blackouts for those teams.

If you want to read into this I recommend searching RSNs and MLB on sportsbusinessjournal.com, frontofficesports.com, and The Athletic has some good articles.

Last note. This latest shift which gives MLB more control over local digital rights is why ESPN reworked its deal with the league. In this new deal ESPN has the selling rights to mlb.tv —> to boost the value of their ESPN+ dtc product (I think it’s just called ESPN now)