Major League Baseball All-Star is basically a week of tentpoles, and the league’s broadcast partners and brands are cramming more into the tent than ever.

Earlier this week, Fox announced to Variety that it had sold out its ad inventory of roughly 80 commercials for the 2025 MLB All-Star Game in June—nearly a month earlier than usual, and for a reported $750,000 to $850,000 per 30 seconds. What Fox Sports evp of ad sales Mark Evans didn’t mention, but told ADWEEK later, was that demand for this year’s All-Star Game on July 15 surfaced as early as Fox’s 2024 sports-heavy upfront. Did it help MLB All-Star ad presales in January and February to surround MLB announcers Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez with pitches for Super Bowl 59 and the 2026 World Cup a few months earlier?

“Yeah, I think it did: I think marketers in general are now recognizing that there are fewer and fewer places to aggregate scale quickly,” Evans told ADWEEK. “There just aren’t that many seminal events that bring so many millions of Americans together at the same time, and live sports leads that charge…[but] if marketers don’t place that bet early, the pricing only escalates, and then eventually we sell out and they can’t get in at all.”

Last year, the All-Star Game drew 7.6 million viewers across Fox channels—up 6% from a year earlier, but down from 8 million before the pandemic and 10 million a decade ago. That said, it still drew more viewers than the NFL Pro Bowl Games (5.79 million), NBA All-Star Game (5.4 million in 2024), WNBA All-Star (3.4 million), and NHL All-Star (1.4 million). Even the Home Run Derby averaged 5.45 million viewers for ESPN in 2024 during what was considered a lull for an event that drew 7 million viewers as recently as 2021 and 8 million in 2017.

Since last year, Disney Advertising has seen demand for ad space increase 30% for not only its broadcast of the T-Mobile Home Run Derby on July 14, but for the Nike-sponsored MLB Draft on July 13. While both events have several MLB official sponsors and returning advertisers, the 21 brands making their first appearance at both events in 2025 contributed more than half of the total ad revenue for each broadcast.

“If you watch the Draft, we do some incredible storytelling within that environment, and Home Run Derby is just action-packed, super exciting, and gives brands the opportunity to be culturally relevant in moments that are unpredictable,” said Danielle Brown, Disney Advertising’s svp of sports streaming and brand solutions. “We’ve already exceeded our plan for Home Run Derby, so it’s encouraging to see that these [events] are continuing on an upward trajectory.”

But as more brands step in for All-Star camera time and crowd the plate, both broadcast partners and Major League Baseball itself have to get creative with their game plans to squeeze as many players onto the field as possible. For MLB media partners, it means offering robust packages of properties that make less-than-ideal in-game positioning more palatable, or supplementing event placements with social media or studio presence.

For MLB, it means giving All-Star veterans like T-Mobile more duties, including implementing its Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System (ABS) at the All-Star Game for the first time ever. It means giving GEICO space to launch its GEICO Relievers campaign during the celebrity softball game it sponsors. It also requires the league to occasionally have its brand teammates work together, as T-Mobile and apparel provider Fanatics are handing out FanCash through a QR code and driving fans to the MLB Shop. 

“Whenever we enter into any partnership on the MLB side, we always love for our partners to pull a number of different levers to bring their partnerships to life, and the broadcast media piece of it is such an important component,” said MLB CMO Uzma Rawn Dowler. “We love when they lean in and create activations and executions and social content that lives on MLB.com and our social handles, but also extend those activations and those platforms onto broadcast as well.”

Mastercard is the longtime presenting sponsor of the All-Star Game and will still partner with Fox in support of Stand Up to Cancer, with Fox airing a moment during the game when fans hold up placards with the names of friends or loved ones struggling with cancer. Rawn Dowler noted that T-Mobile is often able to speak directly to Fox about where its initiatives can fit in an All-Star Game broadcast.

While official MLB sponsors typically make up 30% of All-Star Game ad buyers or more, Fox’s Evans noted that this year they were a smaller portion of the overall base thanks to increased interest. It’s unusual, he added, because of the variability of ad units in a baseball game based on the number of times teams change pitchers, the home team extending a game a half inning if they’re behind in the ninth, and extra innings if both teams are tied after nine.

That creates variability in the number of ads a brand can run, and clients typically don’t like “floaters”—or units that Fox can’t guarantee will get in, even during a high-profile, high-priced event like the All-Star Game. But does a package with, say, NFL properties, college football, NASCAR, IndyCar, or any of Fox’s recent “Summer of Soccer” offerings—Copa America, Concacaf Gold Cup, women’s and men’s European Championships, MLS Leagues Cup, etc.—take a bit of the edge off?

“Without a doubt. We sell the biggest marquee events regularly. We’re very fortunate to have the portfolio that we have at Fox Sports, but of course, we package our other events with the largest and biggest and brightest events that we have,” Evans said. “So it gives marketers an option with increased scale across the portfolio and supporting all of the different aspects of what we do, not only in Fox Sports, but at Fox Corporation.”

When ESPN airs the Home Run Derby, Google Cloud does a live look-in and provides a data-driven Statcast alternate broadcast on ESPN 2. ESPN Bet does a Derby live update to encourage wagers. T-Mobile provides Fanatics a lower-third graphic throughout the broadcast for the FastCash giveaway. GEICO and Capital One each sponsor segments within the event.

For example, ESPN’s Baseball Tonight airs both the night of the Home Run Derby and the All-Star Game itself. Google Cloud, T-Mobile, and Capital One are among the brands that bought in.

“Leading into and out of [events], how do we utilize Sports Center in terms of sponsorship, how do we tap into social because we know that events like the Home Run Derby drive a lot of social presence and a lot of social engagement?” Brown said. “That’s another opportunity for brands to be a part of it if we’re capped for the actual broadcast itself.”

When MLB needs to make room for brands, it can simply extend All-Star Week’s schedule of events. From the first pitch at the HBCU Swingman Classic on July 11 to the final out of the All-Star Game on July 15, All-Star Week is now a five-day event with new installments, including the Home Run Derby X 3-on-3 hitting and catching competition between baseball and softball players (sponsored by business software company Sage).

In between a red carpet sponsored by Deer Park and an All-Star Village of activations sponsored by Capital One—where German apparel company and new MLB partner Strauss will be debuting a campaign—there are events like Capital One’s VIP welcome reception for clients, where guests can get pitching tips from Hall of Famer Greg Maddux and take photos in a branded dugout.

“Some of our partners have 17 activations happening, and some of our partners have three activations happening, and that’s sort of the beauty of this event and this week,” Rawn Dowler said. “We’ve done a really good job of creating pockets and moments for our partners to come to life in places that make sense for them.”