The MLB Field of Dreams Game is returning next season, and returning to broadcast television.
Major League Baseball said Friday that its Field of Dreams Game from Dyersville, Iowa, will return next season and be televised by the NBC broadcast network. The game will pit the Red Sox against the Royals and again take place on the second Thursday in August.
The announcement came one day after this year’s Field of Dreams Game, which aired exclusively on Netflix.
The first Field of Dreams Game in August 2021 paired the Yankees against the White Sox and aired on the FOX broadcast network. Its audience of nearly six million viewers remains the largest for any Major League Baseball regular season window since 2005.
Viewership fell by nearly half for the second Field of Dreams Game between the Cubs and Reds the following year, which also aired on FOX. But even that was still the second-largest audience of that season, behind only a Red Sox-Yankees game at the height of the Aaron Judge home run chase.
The audience for this year’s Field of Dreams Game will not be known until next week, but thus far, Netflix-exclusive MLB windows have come in slightly below their linear equivalents. The Netflix MLB Opening Night game in March averaged 2.97 million viewers, a figure that was surpassed by NBC’s primetime Opening Day game the following night (3.16M across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics).
The MLB Home Run Derby on Netflix in July was the least-watched since 2003, if down a modest 8% from the prior year on ESPN.
It is not clear which event Netflix will carry next season in place of Field of Dreams. The streamer has rights to Opening Night, the Derby, and another special event game.
As for NBC, Field of Dreams is just the latest addition to a sports lineup that has grown considerably in just the past 18 months. The event is late enough in the season that it would almost certainly be played even in the event of a lengthy lockout (though obviously not in the event of a canceled season). It remained on the schedule even in the COVID-shortened 2020 season that began in July, and was only called off after positive tests on the participating St. Louis Cardinals.
It should be noted that special event games like Field of Dreams were not included in the MLB rights package that ESPN opted out of, and NBC and Netflix subsequently acquired, last year. Prior to last year, those games generally belonged to Fox Sports.
