Last year, ESPN and Major League Baseball appeared to have struck out. A decades-old alliance was torn asunder, with the Disney sports giant backing away from its long-running “Sunday Night Baseball.”
Those Sunday games have gone to NBC, but ESPN believes it has gotten its corporate mitt on something better.
ESPN on Friday started distributing MLB.TV via the ESPN App and ESPN.com., a venture that ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro has long coveted. The pact, part of a realignment of MLB’s sports-rights relationships gives ESPN purview over thousands of games that are made available to fans outside a specific…