With the return of Major League Baseball, MLB Network is giving fans more of its morning show to enjoy. As reported by The Big Lead’s Kyle Koster, MLB Central will add an hour to its daily runtime, starting at 9 a.m. each weekday beginning on April 7, the 2022 season’s Opening Day.
Since its 2015 debut, MLB Central has been a three-hour program led by Robert Flores, Lauren Shehadi, and Mark DeRosa, airing from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET. The show features plenty of analysts, correspondents, players, managers, and figures throughout Major League Baseball and baseball media, in addition to feature segments.
As Koster notes, expanding MLB Central is part of MLB Network’s effort to increase live programming throughout the day. With the additional hour, MLB Network will air live shows for a 17-hour span each day during the regular season. Other programs in that live block of programming include High Heat, MLB Now, Intentional Talk, and MLB Tonight.
Adding an hour to MLB Central also should give MLB Network an opportunity to reach fans in the early-morning block that’s become increasingly popular with sports TV viewers.
Shows like NFL Network’s Good Morning Football, ESPN’s Get Up, FS1’s First Things First, Peacock’s Pro Football Talk Live, and simulcast radio programming such as Keyshawn, JWill, and Max on ESPN2 and CBS Sports Network’s telecast of Boomer & Gio have shown the appetite for live sports talk (with some irreverence) in the early morning, something that MLB Network has missed out on with re-airings of Quick Pitch and MLB Tonight.
MLB Central has been on in mid-mornings, up against the likes of ESPN’s First Take and FS1’s Undisputed, but this gives MLB Network a chance to not only react to the previous night’s action but set the conversation for the day to come as fans get into their workday.
Additionally, there’s some catching up to do. Fans who may have turned away from baseball, fed up with the labor dispute between team owners and players, now need to catch up on what their teams did before the lockout and the frenzy of offseason moves since that was resolved. More MLB Central provides more information for fans to consume before April 7.
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.
