Major League Baseball will open next season with a rare standalone Opening Night game, though it is anybody’s guess where it will air.
MLB announced Tuesday that its 2026 season will begin with the Yankees facing the Giants in a standalone Opening Night game on Wednesday, March 25. MLB did not announce a time or channel, but ESPN — which holds rights to Opening Day under its expiring rights deal — is occupied that night with an NBA doubleheader.
There has been no indication of where Opening Day games will end up under the new media rights deals that MLB is currently negotiating. Per the latest reporting, “Sunday Night Baseball” and Wild Card playoff games are expected to go to NBCUniversal and the Home Run Derby to Netflix, with ESPN getting a new package of exclusive national games, MLB.tv and local rights to five clubs. But the current ESPN deal also includes a handful of weeknight games, including Opening Day, that may or may not be spoken for.
The most sensible outcome is that those additional weeknight games are included in the “Sunday Night Baseball” portion of the package and would air on NBCU.
Not counting international games, Yankees-Giants will mark MLB’s first standalone Opening Night game since 2015 — when the season opened with Cardinals-Cubs on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball.” It will be the first Opening Night with fewer than three games scheduled since the COVID-shortened season of 2020, which opened in mid-July with a doubleheader of Yankees-Nationals and Giants-Dodgers.
The March 25 date allows MLB to avoid direct competition with the NCAA men’s basketball tournament regional semifinals, which have unsurprisingly dominated Opening Day games in the ratings the past few years.
The 28 other MLB clubs are set to open their season on March 26.
With ESPN a virtual lock to lose “Sunday Night Baseball” after this season, MLB did not mention its annual “Little League Classic” in its schedule release announcement Tuesday. Even if ESPN continues to air exclusive games on another night of the week, it is not clear that it would be logistically feasible to schedule the event on a night other than Sunday.