Is Sunday Morning Baseball something that would interest you? MLB and Peacock are hoping the answer is yes.
According to the Wall Street Journal, part of NBC’s new rights deal with MLB will involve broadcasting Sunday games on its streaming service. And to avoid conflict with most games played at 1 p.m. ET throughout the league, some of the 18 broadcasts scheduled for Peacock could start as early as 11:30 a.m. ET or just before noon.
The Peacock Sunday broadcasts will be exclusive to the streaming service and not available on MLB teams’ respective regional sports networks (and thus, not MLB.TV either). NBC is also expected to stream Monday and Wednesday telecasts (previously shown on ESPN) during its two-year deal. Previously, those telecasts were not exclusive but simulcasts from RSNs and blacked out in local markets.
MLB and NBC Sports have yet to officially announce their new deal, but it’s expected to be finalized this week now that baseball and the players union have agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement. The 2022 MLB season is now scheduled to begin on April 7.
The NBC Sports/Peacock rights deal is one of two streaming packages MLB has lined up for the 2022 season and beyond. Apple has also agreed to a deal to stream baseball games in an exclusive Friday night package including two games each week. Those broadcasts will be exclusive to Apple TV+.
With these two new deals, baseball fans will now likely be looking for their team’s games or standout matchups on a variety of outlets. Two of those platforms will be entirely new to fans for watching baseball, and they’ll have to sign up for subscriptions to do so.
The majority of a team’s games will be available on its RSN. But in a given week, broadcasts could be on Peacock (and occasionally NBC), Turner (which will now air games Tuesday nights as part of its new rights deal), Apple, ESPN (Sunday Night Baseball), MLB Network, and Fox (or FS1, on Saturdays). That could be quite a whiparound on a particular week.
Ian Casselberry is a sports media columnist for BSM. He has previously written and edited for Awful Announcing, The Comeback, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, MLive, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation. You can find him on Twitter @iancass or reach him by email at iancass@gmail.com.
