The Walt Disney Company’s multiplex sports network ESPN will stop broadcasting Major League Baseball (MLB) games upon the conclusion of the current season, executives at the broadcaster confirmed on Thursday.

The decision follows an agreement between ESPN and MLB to terminate a multi-year contract that allows the sports juggernaut to broadcast a package of nationally-televised games through 2028.

The contract included a provision that allowed either party to opt-out of the agreement early, which would have given ESPN and MLB the right to renegotiate its TV distribution deal. The deadline for opting-out of the agreement was March 1.

ESPN will continue to broadcast Sunday evening MLB games as well as the wild card-round playoff this season.

The decision to walk away from the contract was the end result of weeks of negotiations between ESPN and MLB, which apparently involved a request by the professional baseball league for more money in order to continue offering the games on the cable network.

“We do not think it’s beneficial for us to accept a smaller deal to remain on a shrinking platform,” MLB Commissioner Ron Manfred wrote in a memo to team owners on Thursday, which was obtained by the New York Times and first reported by its sports vertical The Athletic.

“In order to best position MLB to optimize our rights going in to our next deal cycle, we believe it is not prudent to devalue our rights with an existing partner but rather to have our marquee regular season games, Home Run Derby and Wild Card playoff round on a new broadcast and/or streaming platform,” Manfred continued.

Manfred said the league has been involved with “several interested parties around these rights over the past several months,” though he did not specify anyone by name. He did indicate that at least two broadcasters are among the “potential options” being considered; he did not say whether the broadcasters operated on over-the-air TV, cable or streaming platforms, or had distribution across some combination of the three.

Executives at ESPN say they remain committed to covering the sports of baseball through their channels, even though the network will no longer carry MLB after this season.

“We are grateful for our longstanding relationship with Major League Baseball and proud of how ESPN’s coverage super-serves fans,” a spokesperson for ESPN said in a statement. “In making this decision, we applied the same discipline and fiscal responsibility that has built ESPN’s industry-leading live events portfolio as we continue to grow our audience across linear, digital and social platforms. As we have been throughout the process, we remain open to exploring new ways to serve MLB fans across our platforms beyond 2025.”

The decision to walk away from its contract with the MLB comes several months before ESPN is set to debut a new direct-to-consumer streaming service that will allow sports fans to watch ESPN’s cable networks without a traditional pay TV package for the first time. ESPN has long been offered on Dish Network’s Sling TV and is also available on Hulu with Live TV, YouTube TV, DirecTV Stream and Fubo — though all of those services also require subscribers to pay for non-sports channels owned by Disney like FX and Freeform.

Over the past few years, MLB executives have expressed a strong interest in having more control over the distribution of live games on both a local and national basis.

After sports broadcaster Diamond Sports Group — now Main Street Sports Group — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy two years ago, MLB took over distribution rights of some games carried on their Bally Sports (now FanDuel Sports Network) channels.

In some markets, MLB worked with teams to launch their own streaming platforms, while in other areas, the teams forged distribution agreements with over-the-air broadcasters, or used some combination of streaming and broadcast TV to reach fans. The company emerged from bankruptcy with a plan to drop most of its MLB telecasts across its network of FanDuel Sports-branded channels; it retains local TV rights to Atlanta Braves games, with some events sublicensed to over-the-air broadcaster Gray Media.