Michael Kay will be watching Opening Day from the stands. Again.
Last year, when ESPN held the Yankees opener and put Joe Buck on the call, Kay — who has either written or announced Opening Day for 37 consecutive years — was “red-hot” about it and ended up in the seats at Yankee Stadium with his son Charlie. This year, Netflix has the game, YES Network is shut out again, and Kay told Newsday the whole thing “sucks.” He’s flying to San Francisco with his family — YES Network has the middle game of the Yankees’ opening series, so he’ll be on the call for that one, but Wednesday’s opener belongs to Netflix. The pageantry of Opening Day, he said — the pomp and circumstance, the thing that makes it feel different from any other game on the calendar — will be happening without him for the second straight year.
That said, the two straight Opening Days in the stands aren’t just a personal annoyance for Kay, as much as they’re a pretty good illustration of the broader problem he sees with where baseball is heading. As we laid out this week, the sport in 2026 is spread across Netflix, NBC, Peacock, ESPN, Fox, FS1, TBS, Apple TV, and MLB Network, the product of Rob Manfred opting out of ESPN’s $550 million-per-year deal fourteen months ago, setting off a chain reaction that gave the sport a presence on more networks than it has ever had at once. The league has spent the months since congratulating itself on the outcome. Kay isn’t so sure the people actually trying to watch the games feel the same way.
“The fragmentation is concerning. Especially for older fans. Baseball should not forget that a big part of their audience are older fans,” he told Barrett Media. “They either don’t have the money for the streaming service, or can’t navigate it. There has to be a way to make it easier… I’m a capitalist, and I know that they’re trying to make as much money as they can. But you also have to serve your customers too.”
As of the writing of the article, many teams still haven’t formally announced their local cable distribution plans heading into Opening Day, leaving fans to wake up Wednesday morning with no clear answer on where to watch their team play its first game of the season. That’s the direct fallout from the regional sports network collapse that sent half the league scrambling to rebuild its local broadcast infrastructure from scratch this winter.
On the national side, 40% of MLB fans say blackouts regularly affect how they watch games, a problem that long predates the current reshuffling and has only gotten more tangled as the sport expands across more platforms. Manfred has said the blackout fix comes in 2028, when the league renegotiates its entire rights package and can build relief into the new deals from the start. But for the fans Kay is describing, 2028 is a long way away.
For now, Kay will watch from the stands again. Somewhere, a Yankees fan is staring at a login screen, trying to figure out which of the nine platforms has tonight’s game.