Terry Francona became an analyst for Sunday Night Baseball). ESPN broadcast each of the four major professional sports leagues in North America from 2002 until 2004, when it cut ties with the National Hockey League. The network aired NHL games from 1980 to 1982, from 1986 to 1989, from 1992 to 2004, and most recently from 2021 to the present. ESPN has been broadcasting Major League Soccer games about once a week on ESPN2 since that league's inception in 1996. In most years, the annual All-Star Game and MLS Cup championship game, and in some years, the Opening Night game, are shown on ABC broadcast stations. With the increasing cost of live sports entertainment, such as the US$8.8 billion cost to acquire NFL football broadcast rights for eight years, "scripted entertainment has become a luxury item for ESPN," said David Carter, director of the Sports Business Institute at the University of Southern California in a 2007 interview in Variety. ESPN broadcasts 65 sports, 24 hours a day in 16 languages in more than 200 countries. Expansion ESPN set itself apart from its competition by using the top reporters for each of their respective sports by the early 1990s. Some examples include: Peter Gammons (baseball), Chris Mortensen (football), Al Morganti (hockey), David Aldridge (basketball) and Mel Kiper, Jr. (NFL Draft). Other well-known reporters have included Andrea Kremer, Ed Werder and Mark Schwartz. The 1990s and early 2000s saw a considerable growth within the company. ESPN Radio launched on January 1, 1992 and has seen tremendous success. ESPN2 was launched on October 1, 1993, beginning with the inaugural telecast of SportsNite, hosted by Keith Olbermann and Suzy Kolber. Three years later on November 1, 1996, ESPNews was launched, with Mike Tirico as the channel's first anchor. In 1997, ESPN acquired the Classic Sports Network for $175 million from the channel's founders, Brian Bedol and Steve Greenberg, and renamed it ESPN Classic. ESPNU, a network focusing exclusively on collegiate sports, was launched on March 4, 2005. ESPN made its expansion into video gaming by joining forces with game publisher Sony Imagesoft for a series of video games in 1993. The venture was short-lived, only releasing fewer titles for the SNES, Sega Genesis and Sega CD. In 1994, ESPN launched The ESPN Sports Poll, created by the Chilton Company. The Sports Poll was the first ongoing national daily study of sports fan activities and