Philadelphia ? In a deal that baseball commissioner Bud Selig hailed as evidence that the game is in “a golden age,” cable giant ESPN has agreed to pay nearly $2.4 billion to televise 80 regular-season major-league games a year for eight years.

Selig and ESPN president George Bodenheimer announced the agreement Wednesday.

Financial terms of the contract were not revealed, but a source familiar with it said that ESPN would pay an average of $296 million a year for the rights to televise games on Sunday, Monday and Wednesday nights.

ESPN also will pay an average of $11 million a year for radio-broadcast rights and $30 million a year to televise games on new media such as cell phones and wireless devices, according to the source.

The Fox network, baseball’s other major television partner, has a six-year contract to broadcast regular-season and postseason games, as well as the All-Star Game. That deal, which expires after next season, is worth an average of $416.7 million per year – a total of about $2.5 billion.

Bodenheimer described the pact as “a win-win for ESPN and for baseball,” and industry analysts agreed.

The new contract replaces an expiring six-year pact under which ESPN televised the Sunday night game and two games on Wednesdays. That contract was worth an estimated $815 million.

ESPN will continue to have exclusive rights to the Sunday night game, as it does under its current contract, meaning that ESPN will be the only channel carrying the game that night.

To provide flexibility, ESPN will pick the Sunday night games for the first two months of the season before the season begins.

The network will schedule Sunday night games for the second two months of the season three weeks in advance and for the final two months two weeks in advance, ESPN vice president Len DeLuca said.

ESPN also will televise Monday night NFL games beginning next season. For the period when the baseball and football seasons overlap, the baseball game will move to ESPN2.