Souhan: Leaving ESPN is a bad idea for Major League Baseball

Spring training games and sites tend to blur when you spend a lot of time in Florida, but I remember it being Dunedin, where I saw Jayson Stark standing by the visiting team’s dugout before the Blue Jays played host to the Twins in 2017.

Stark became famous in Philadelphia, then nationally, for writing a remarkably fact-and-trivia-filled column that overflowed with baseball history and enthusiasm.

I hadn’t spoken to Stark in years, so I ran down from the press box. He looked at me and said, “I don’t think I’m going to be with ESPN much longer. Cuts are coming.”

Stark was a mainstay of ESPN’s baseball coverage. Wise man that I am, I told him there was no way ESPN would get rid of Jayson Stark.

He was laid off a month later. ESPN’s baseball coverage has been the poorer for that move.

On a more recent trip to spring training, I ran into another ESPN baseball mainstay who told me that he had started planning his post-broadcast life. Whether because of layoffs, declining coverage of baseball or a desire for young talent, he figured he wouldn’t be long for the network.

This made me sad, but he seemed happy to have a future that did not involve looking over his shoulder at faceless, bloodless network executives.

Once I figured out that I wanted to be a sportswriter, I dreamed of covering baseball. My first beat job: covering the Twins for the Star Tribune in 1993. By then, ESPN had become an essential part of any baseball fan’s life.

“Sunday Night Baseball,” from the studio show through the game coverage, was so well done it approached art.

ESPN doesn’t always hire the right writers to cover sports; in this case, they did. Stark, Tim Kurkjian and Buster Olney were among the writers featured on ESPN who were admired throughout the industry for their honesty, passion and hustle.

They’re nice people, too.

ESPN also employed Peter Gammons, who with the Boston Globe invented modern sports beat writing.

The writers and fans are who I thought of when reading the news that ESPN might not broadcast Major League Baseball games after 2025.

ESPN doesn’t want to pay MLB what it has been paying because it doesn’t cover the sport as intensely as it once did. MLB doesn’t want to accept a reduced rate.

Maybe they’ll find a way to work together after this season, but we will likely never return to the days when you could turn on one of ESPN’s channels during the summer and find something baseball-related, featuring faces and voices you liked and trusted.

Now the onus is on Commissioner Rob Manfred, and that’s probably not good for baseball.

One of many factors in ESPN’s decision was probably the financial imbalance of baseball and what it’s doing to the sport’s popularity.

One team, the Dodgers, can sign anybody it wants. About 20 teams made zero large free-agent deals this winter because they know they’d lose money if they did.

In the NFL, you tune in on Sunday knowing that the team from Green Bay has been given the same chance to win as the teams from Los Angeles.

In baseball, you see rich teams taking advantage of their large financial advantage because they don’t have to share local broadcast revenues.

What baseball needs is to get its house in order and then eventually reunite with ESPN.

Baseball needs a punitive system for teams that overspend.

The Dodgers want a $400 million payroll? Then they should face a “luxury tax” that strips them of high draft picks, or the ability to sign international players, or the ability to sign more free agents.

MLB could structure the tax the way the NBA does, with different “aprons” of spending triggering different punishments.

Or this: Teams spending more than $200 million have to pay a tax, the proceeds of which are divided between lower-payroll teams.

Baseball needs to give casual sports observers a reason to watch.

ESPN’s baseball coverage, highlighted by “Baseball Tonight” and all of those great writers, was for many fans the sport’s easiest point of entry.