No other news organization covers Major League Baseball like The Associated Press.
As AP’s global sports team gears up for the 2025 season, Global Sports Editor Ricardo Zuniga details the news organization’s coverage plans and continued focus on delivering compelling journalism for customers and digital audiences:
How will AP be covering MLB this year?
The start of the MLB season is right around the corner and AP Sports has a comprehensive plan in place to cover the stories, trends, players, and games that resonate with customers and digital audiences. With 2,430 regular season games spread over six plus months, baseball coverage is unlike any other sport – more a marathon than a sprint – and presents us with unique opportunities and challenges. You can expect AP to continue delivering fast, accurate news; to be ahead of the curve spotting and reporting emerging trends, while covering games with a bigger focus on news breakouts and viral moments; and producing the journalism in digital friendly formats. No news organization can match AP’s reach in baseball.
What’s different this season and why? What stays the same?
AP will continue to cover every single MLB game this season, a core offering of our global sports report, which is sweeping and sprawling. We serve audiences and customers around the world who rely on us to cover a wide variety of sports and who have different coverage needs that are constantly evolving.
Some things never change, like AP’s commitment to accurate, fast and distinctive sports reporting. At the same time, it is more important than ever to be strategic about some of our resources and focus them on the things that our customers and audiences need from us most against the backdrop of broader pressures in the media industry that have affected all news organizations.
This includes reimagining how we cover games and what we prioritize, with a focus on digital audiences and customers. For example, we’ve successfully implemented in other sports tighter game stories that get to customers faster. This format delivers the key elements that digital customers and readers need while giving our reporters additional bandwidth to focus on other high-impact stories like news breakouts and trends. This season, we’ll start using a similar version of the game story in our MLB coverage. We will also be more strategic about when it makes sense to have a reporter in the press box. To be sure, we’ll maintain in-person coverage at the vast majority of games and will cover a few games remotely like we’ve done in other sports for years. Our priority will always be to deliver fast and compelling coverage in formats that our customers and audiences crave.
What can customers and audiences expect to see from AP’s sports coverage beyond the MLB?
Our sports report broadly, including MLB coverage, is evolving to meet the needs of digital audiences and customers. It’s no longer about volume or being everywhere all at once. For us in AP Sports, there’s a greater emphasis on producing smart, engaging content, and delivering it in the way that audiences want to engage with it. Sometimes this means a traditional longform narrative, and often it will mean creating a short video explainer on breaking news or a trending topic. Fact-based reporting and breaking news are core to AP’s sports report, but going deeper with analysis and crossover stories that leverage our resources beyond sports will be a focus, too. We want to take audiences behind the scenes and offer them profiles of athletes and newsmakers in the sports world. We’re doing this daily as we cover the changing landscape of college athletics, the rise in popularity and challenges faced by women in sports, and the preparations for the upcoming 2026 World Cup and Winter Games, to name a few beats. We’re excited about the storytelling opportunities ahead of us.
Related articles
