How ESPN And Little League Created A Longstanding, Multi-Million Dollar Partnership

Late last week, baseball teams from all over the world began arriving in South Williamsport, Pa., the venerable home of the Little League World Series. For the players and coaches alike, the trip is the culmination of a long-held dream of competing on youth sports’ largest stage.

Starting on Wednesday, they will be in the national spotlight as the 75th anniversary of the LLWS opens with a quadruple header on ESPN. During the next 12 days, each of the event’s 38 games will be televised on ABC, ESPN or ESPN2, culminating with the championship on Aug. 28 on ABC.

The partnership between Little League and the television networks goes back decades. In fact, ABC has televised Little League World Series games since 1963, the second-longest deal between a network and event, trailing only the Masters on CBS, which dates to 1956. ESPN, meanwhile, has aired Little League games since 1987.

The relationship has become a financial boon for Little League. In 2013, Little League and ESPN finalized a deal that pays the organization about $7.5 million annually through this year, according to Sports Business Journal. In August 2020, the sides agreed to extend their agreement through 2030.

“We truly appreciate the ability to tell our story through ESPN,” said Liz DiLullo Brown, Little League’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “The fact we’ve been partners for so long, they have an amazing group of talent and production teams. The individuals who work on our business at ESPN, they just know us very well. It allows us to showcase some of the stories that are important to us.”

Little League was founded in Williamsport in 1939, making it the first youth baseball league in the U.S. The World Series began in 1947, while the initial World Series at the current site occurred in 1959.

Over the ensuing decades, the organization has expanded to the point that it currently sponsors about 6,500 baseball and softball leagues in the U.S. and more than 80 other countries. Local leagues operate independently but must pay the organization $10 per team to use the Little League name, and they must also have accident and general liability insurance.

Little League, a non-profit, is headquartered in South Williamsport, which is in the middle of Pennsylvania, about 175 miles from Philadelphia and 200 miles from Pittsburgh. There are also five regional offices in the U.S. and four in other countries.

The organization generated nearly $22.5 million in revenue for the 12 months through September 2020, according to its most recent Form 990 filing with the IRS. That is down from $32.3 million for the previous 12 months due to the fact that the coronavirus pandemic began in March 2020 and led to the cancellation of leagues and the World Series in 2020.

Little League has about 90 full-time employees, some of whom are highly compensated: Steve Keener, the CEO and president, earned $490,719 for the 12 months through September 2020, while the four senior vice presidents each earned just over $287,000.

Little League has numerous relationships with major companies throughout the U.S. and world, including official sponsorship deals with 12 companies such as adidas, Capital OneCOF
, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Gatorade and Topps.

“The revenue we’re generating is really meant to be reinvested in the program and keep the affiliation and operating costs of our local leagues to as minimum of a level as possible,” DiLullo Brown said.

Little League also has a partnership with Major League Baseball. In fact, since 2017, there has been an MLB Little League Classic, an MLB game held each August during the Little League World Series at Bowman Field in Williamsport. This year’s version features the Boston Red Sox playing the Baltimore Orioles on Sunday night.

That game will air at 7 p.m. on ESPN with the usual Sunday Night Baseball announcing crew of Karl Ravech, Eduardo Perez and David Cone. Earlier that day, those three will call a Little League World Series game, as well.

Ravech, one of ESPN’s top play-by-play broadcasters, has called Little League World Series games for years, and he will be the main voice this year, too. Mike Monaco, a talented young broadcaster who’s called Boston Red Sox games and other big events, will handle play-by-play duties when Ravech is not in the booth. Analysts for the games will include high-profile names such as Tim Kurkjian, Jessica Mendoza and Kyle Peterson, a sign that ESPN takes the event seriously and the announcers enjoy the experience. Kurkjian last year wrote about his first time covering the Little League World Series in 2015, calling it “a career highlight.”

In recent years, ESPN has expanded its coverage of Little League, including airing all of the Little League Softball World Series, which ended on Monday in North Carolina. This year, the company is airing about 340 Little League games, with most of the regional games on ESPN+, the streaming platform that launched in April 2018.

“The joy of ESPN+ is that it gave us a much bigger playing field to put these games on,” said Rick Mace, a senior manager in ESPN’s programming department. “The challenge of the linear networks is there’s only so much real estate to go around, When ESPN+ launched, it was the perfect place for us to expand.”

ESPN plans on continuing its expansive coverage of Little League in the coming years. The games typically draw good ratings, according to Mace, and provide live events at a slow time on the sports calendar before football begins. And despite the millions of dollars the event generates each year, many people are drawn to the nostalgic feel of the Little League World Series, which still offers free admission to games and draws an average of 20,000 to 30,000 people for each of the event’s 12 days at the two fields where it hosts games: Howard J. Lamade Stadium and Volunteer Stadium.

Mace has attended eight consecutive Little League World Series in a work capacity, but to him, it’s also an enjoyable family vacation. For the past several years, he has brought along his son, who is now 13, and daughter, who is 11.

“This is honestly my favorite work trip of the year every year,” Mace said. “I don’t joke around when I say it is my favorite trip…Going to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the Little League fields there, it’s like a little oasis of everything that’s great about sports. I remember my first time driving out there in the middle of Pennsylvania questioning where the heck was I and then pulling up to the Little League complex there and walking down to Lamade and Volunteer stadiums. It is just such a unique, great experience. It really is like no other.”