Not every MLB team can be the New York Yankees. Or the Atlanta Braves. Even the Los Angeles Dodgers. For my 45 years on the planet, I have been a fan of the Chicago White Sox, a team that had made the postseason seven previous times during my lifetime, not including this magical 2026 run to an AL Wild Card berth.
Do I expect a World Series on the South Side in 2026? No. But if I were still a resident of the Windy City, the bigger question would be whether I could watch the games.
This year marks the first year of NBC Sports’ media rights agreement with MLB. It’s also the first year that MLB playoff games will air on a streaming service. That means local residents in some markets have to pay an added fee to watch playoff baseball featuring their local teams.
This isn’t right, and it’s something NBC and MLB could fix immediately.
Where’s The Game?
There’s nothing like playoff baseball. You can have the drama of the NFL postseason. Even the grind of the quest for the Stanley Cup. October baseball has a feel all its own. The chill in the air. The roar of the crowd. For more than a century, every October has brought new memories and legendary moments that generations celebrate.
It’s difficult to do that if you can’t see it. Baseball should know better.
For all the noise surrounding last year’s ESPN dispute with MLB, baseball fans understood that the games needed to remain accessible. The Wild Card Round schedule is perfect. Baseball from lunch to dinner, with a nightcap on the West Coast. It bleeds into the Division Series, setting up the Championship Series on TBS and FOX.
But if you’re a fan of the White Sox, Cubs, Astros or Padres, you’ll need to pay a little extra.
Yes, the games are on the revamped NBC Sports Network, which relaunched in November. And if you have Comcast Xfinity, Fubo or YouTube TV, you should be set. But fans shouldn’t have to pay extra to watch postseason baseball.
The NFL Does It Right
MLB and NBC could take a page out of the NFL’s playbook.
Every Monday Night Football game on ESPN and ABC is available on a local over-the-air station. Every NFL playoff game, even those exclusive to streaming services, finds a local over-the-air television partner in the markets involved.
Prime Video did the same thing for last year’s Chicago Bears-Green Bay Packers matchup. Two stations in those local markets had one hell of a night in terms of viewership because the NFL understands that fans shouldn’t be restricted from watching their local team in the postseason.
Did NBC and MLB miss the memo on what the NFL has successfully done in its evolution with streaming platforms? For a sport that continues to say it is addressing the struggles surrounding how fans watch the product, MLB couldn’t get out of its own way.
As much criticism as MLB levied against ESPN early last year over how the network shifted its programming priorities toward other sports, at least ESPN showed the games without placing them strictly on the ESPN App.
The irony is that MLB had a giant opportunity sitting right in front of it. And it swung and missed.
Walls Never Work
Instead of using the postseason to make its product as accessible as possible in the markets that care most about these teams, baseball chose to put another barrier between the fan and the game. For a White Sox or Cubs fan in Chicago, a Padres fan in San Diego or an Astros fan in Houston, the postseason should be the time when the connection between a team and its market becomes stronger, not more complicated.
MLB has spent years talking about the importance of growing the game, reaching younger audiences and making baseball easier to watch. That mission doesn’t begin with finding another streaming subscriber during the postseason.
It begins with making sure a fan can turn on the television and watch his or her team when the stakes are at their highest.
The NFL has already shown there is a way to balance streaming, television partners and local access. MLB had the opportunity to do the same thing this October. Instead, it placed playoff baseball behind another paywall for some of its most passionate fans.
There are plenty of things MLB can’t control once October arrives. But it can control whether the people who have spent an entire season investing their time, money and emotion into their local team can actually watch that team when it matters most.
That shouldn’t have been a difficult decision. It should have been an obvious one.
Then again, that’s baseball.
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