Spring has sprung, and so has the 2026 Major League Baseball season.
For fans, watching this year’s opening game was a little different than usual. MLB has been shifting away from regional sports networks and toward modern media rights deals, a change that was on full display last night when Netflix exclusively aired the “Opening Night” matchup between the New York Yankees and the San Francisco Giants as part of a new three-year deal between the league and the streamer.
While the typical slate of Opening Day games airs today as usual, the nontraditional season kickoff on Netflix is indicative of a broader strategic shift that’s underway at MLB. The league is placing increasing emphasis on new-media platforms as it, like many sports organizations, seeks to hook and retain the next generation of fans.
That focus has extended beyond streaming services and into the tech and content space, where the MLB inked and re-upped a number of deals focused on social and creators to support getting games and athletes in front of new eyeballs.
“The World Series was the perfect embodiment of the whole season last year, where we just saw growth in our viewership on national media broadcasts, ticket sales, all that,” Alex Cadicamo, the league’s VP of media business development and strategy, told Marketing Brew. “The ability, particularly on social, to create these viral moments that reached beyond our typical audience, that’s something that, coming out of the season, we had a lot of conversations about.”
The game plan
Ahead of this season, the MLB expanded its multiyear relationship with Adobe, which will allow it to use AI to create fan experiences across channels and leverage Adobe’s LLM brand visibility tool to boost content. The league also recently inked a deal with Polymarket, making it the league’s “official prediction market exchange.”
On social, MLB has relationships with platforms like Reddit, Meta, and X, and last month the league announced the expansion of its multiyear deal with TikTok as part of an effort to “meet fans where they are,” Cameron Gidari, VP of social media and innovation, told us from the league’s New York City headquarters.
Baseball content has been growing on TikTok, with the number of posts on the platform using #MLB up almost 60% from 2024 to 2025. The league has almost 11 million followers across its global TikTok accounts, and views grew considerably in Japan and Korea during the World Series, according to MLB and TikTok.
The league’s success on new-age platforms might come as a surprise when considering that MLB is one of the oldest sports leagues in the country, predating the NFL, NBA, and NHL. But according to Kat Marquez, global sports partnerships lead at TikTok, its social team, at least, stays ahead of the curve.
“MLB is one of our most innovative partners, and they have always been at the cutting edge of driving innovation,” she said. “They were some of the earliest adopters of trends, they have unfettered player access, which is so crucial to building some of the personalities of these athletes, and so they have always been positioned to win.”
MLB is also making moves elsewhere in the media ecosystem. Midway through last season, the league announced a strategic partnership and an ownership stake in Jomboy Media, a sports platform focused largely on baseball content like podcasts, newsletters, and social posts.
Jomboy CEO Courtney Hirsch said purchasing a stake in the company indicated an understanding that new avenues like creator-driven content could help the league reach new fans.
“They are doing an amazing job pulling in the younger generation of baseball fans,” she said. “This is a way to double down on that momentum, because they know that working with creators [and having] distribution on social is how they’re going to continue to pull in the younger viewers.”
The players
This season, the league is poised to focus on developing its own players as creators, while also leveraging its deep content archive from seasons past to appeal to both longtime and modern fans.
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During spring training, TikTok set up a lounge at the MLB Player House in Arizona, where TikTok creator Adam Botkin shared tips on making content with players, Marquez said. Chicago Cubs third baseman Alex Bregman started an account during that time, and Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop Geraldo Perdomo went live from the Player House, she added.
While player content can satisfy some fans, there’s a big enough appetite for sports content that MLB is providing certain creators with access to current and archival footage through its TikTok and Jomboy deals.
To attract new fans, nonathlete creators are an important avenue, since they’re often knowledgeable about the game while also having the perspective necessary to make content that’s “accessible and relatable for someone that has no idea what baseball is,” Hirsch said. It might sound counterintuitive, but sometimes too much athlete content can turn fans away, she told us.
“When we integrate athletes into our content, we don’t see a spike in views or performance,” she said. “We actually sometimes see the opposite, because our community is tuning in for our opinions, the creator voice that they’ve loved and trusted, and they want more of that.”
During the 2025 postseason, Jomboy’s first as an official MLB partner, Jomboy saw more than 2 billion views across platforms and a 76% YoY increase in social views, according to Hirsch. During this month’s World Baseball Classic, the company had 32 million engagements and 933 million views across platforms.
Creator content is also important to league sponsors, she said. Corona, an official MLB sponsor, partnered with Jomboy’s Talkin’ Yanks podcast as part of its first campaign of the season, which also featured players like Los Angeles Dodgers star Mookie Betts.
Throwback
As MLB leans into creators and new media, its social team is simultaneously making a play based on nostalgia, a proven and popular marketing tactic. In addition to giving its content partners access to the archives, the league is using them on its own channels, Gidari said. The MLB Vault channel on YouTube, which highlights memorable moments in league history, has around 205,000 subscribers, and classic MLB games on the league’s FAST channels are high performers, Cadicamo said.
“We think about the legacy of the sport, of the history of sport, as an advantage, not a hindrance, with the younger audience,” Gidari said. “There’s a lot of appetite for vintage.”
At the same time, there’s plenty of room to tap into modern cultural moments, which Gidari’s team was already doing last season. He sees food and music as particularly ripe spaces for baseball to tie up with, given the sport’s reputation for interesting ballpark eats and walk-up songs.
There’s also an opportunity for MLB to make use of IP owned by media partners like Netflix, Cadicamo said, and not just the most popular shows and movies. Content targeting “niche spaces” like comic book, horror, and anime fandoms has performed well in the past, Gidari told us, and can serve as yet another way to expand the league’s reach.
“The more that people see baseball in the feed, the better it is for us,” Gidari said. His ultimate goal for the season, he later added, is to continue to “build on the momentum” from last year.
“We had almost 18 billion video views across all of social last year,” he said. “We want to beat that number this year, and we want to beat it aggressively.”
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