ESPN’s summer months will again feature regular weeknight baseball.
The majority of ESPN’s Major League Baseball games this season — 20 of 30 — will air on Mondays or Wednesdays, hearkening back to the days when the network carried season-long packages on those two nights. ESPN will air games on nine Mondays, including seven in a nine-week stretch from June 15-August 17. It will carry games on seven Wednesdays, including its season opener April 15 (Mets-Dodgers) and its season finale doubleheader on September 23.
ESPN carried “Monday Night Baseball” and “Wednesday Night Baseball” weekly for decades until its 2021 MLB rights deal, which saw the network scale back its inventory to Sunday nights. Now, ESPN will be airing games on those nights — but (largely) not on Sundays.
ESPN’s schedule is concentrated in the summer months of June, July and August, which will feature 23 games on 20 nights. The network will typically air multiple nights of games per week, with two nights scheduled for eight of nine weeks from June 22 to August 23. The network is scheduled for doubleheaders on three nights in that stretch (July 8, July 20 and August 12), meaning it will have three game windows in those weeks.
Adding in two other doubleheaders — scheduled for May 7 (Rays-Red Sox and Cardinals-Padres) and September 23 — ESPN has 11 total weeks this season in which it will carry multiple games. Under its previous rights deal, ESPN typically carried only one game window a week, “Sunday Night Baseball.”
MLB will regularly have seven or eight exclusive national broadcasts per week throughout the summer — with the two (or three) on ESPN joining “MLB Sunday Leadoff” on Peacock, “Sunday Night Baseball” on NBC, the usual FOX Saturday night regional window, and Apple TV’s returning Friday night doubleheader.
ESPN’s game schedule will be limited outside of that summer run, with only four games on three nights during the first two-plus months of the season.
ESPN opted out of the three years remaining on its previous MLB rights deal last February and ultimately gave up its rights to “Sunday Night Baseball,” the MLB Wild Card Series, Opening Day and the Home Run Derby. As part of its new deal, ESPN acquired distribution rights to the MLB.TV digital out-of-market package and in-market streaming rights to any team whose games are produced and distributed by MLB (14 teams). ESPN will not begin exercising the latter right until next season.
While ESPN dropped “Sunday Night Baseball,” it will air the same number of exclusive regular season games as part of its new deal. And with the ability to schedule games without committing to a specific night of the week, ESPN was able to concentrate its schedule on the weakest point of the sports calendar, while dropping portion of the season that is overshadowed by playoff games in the spring and the NFL in the fall.
