Not everybody knows, but baseball doesn’t stop after the World Series. For international baseball fans in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, winter leagues are just beginning. Yet, these leagues are almost impossible to watch in English.

Recently, a clip from the championship game of LIDOM (Liga de Béisbol Profesional de la República Dominicana) in the Dominican Republic went viral. Current Mets minor leaguer Jeffry Yan celebrated a strikeout of 2021 World Series champion Eddie Rosario. If you have never watched LIDOM, you should know that a major difference from Major League Baseball is a much higher tolerance for in-game celebrations.

Have you ever seen a strikeout reaction like this?

Jefry Yan helped Leones del Escogido win their second straight LIDOM championship! pic.twitter.com/KC855RLkwK

— MLB (@MLB) January 28, 2026

But despite the fact that many well-known MLB players, including Ketel Marte, Yanier Diaz, Robinson Cano, and Miguel Sano, play in this league, the only option in the United States to watch these players is in Spanish on MLB.tv.

This goes for leagues in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, too. There are no English-language broadcasts. Ronald Acuna Jr. played in Venezuela this year, but I bet you didn’t know it happened.

This is not the case for other sports with an international presence. If I was looking for a soccer fix, I can turn on Fox Sports at basically any time to watch games from Mexico, Canada, or Saudi Arabia. Fox Sports also airs live rugby and Australian rules football during overnight hours.

Even major summer professional leagues outside the United States, like Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), are almost impossible to watch. Nippon Professional Baseball can only be seen on random FAST channels (For The Fans and Ryz Sports Network) and the Asian American–focused cable channel ChimeTV.

Notably, there is clearly interest in baseball outside of MLB. The United States–Japan World Baseball Classic championship in 2023, which featured many unknown NPB players on Japan, was watched by 4.9 million people on FS1 and Fox Deportes.

But watching national team baseball outside the World Baseball Classic is also hard. The second highest international baseball tournament is the Premier 12. While other professional leagues, including NPB, allow players to participate, only Minor League players from MLB can play. But the players from the USA who do play are often top prospects. Yet, the only way to watch the 2024 edition was through DAZN.

The news is not all bad for international baseball on TV. MLB Network will air every game from the Caribbean Series for the second consecutive year. The Caribbean Series this year features the champions of leagues in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, along with Panama.

But MLB Network could be doing much more to promote international baseball. Quick Pitch is a great show, but 12 AM–3 AM could be replaced by a showing of a game from Japan, or even South Korea.

MLB Network’s studio programming is class-leading during the offseason, but weekend afternoons could be replaced by live games from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, or the Dominican Republic.

To be clear, some of this is outside of Major League Baseball and MLB Network’s control. If half of Japan’s teams don’t want to sell their TV rights overseas, there is very little they can do about that.

The development of the World Baseball Classic has shown that baseball wants to be seen as an international sport. But the beauty of the one true international sport, soccer, is that you can watch high-level soccer relatively easily from leagues across Europe, along with North and South America.

Major League Baseball clearly believes baseball developing internationally is to its benefit, but to accomplish this, it needs to be much easier to watch and consume baseball across the world.