ESPN and MLB are opting out of their TV deal early. Analysts say ESPN's coming streaming service will be just fine without baseball.

The calculus behind ESPN’s decision to walk away from its longstanding partnership with Major League Baseball may have been a bit knottier than a simple cost-benefit analysis would otherwise suggest—nothing’s ever simple when so many terminal zeroes are involved—but you don’t need an advanced economics degree to intuit that Disney’s departure was inevitable.