The landscape for Major League Baseball telecasts will change in 2026. And that change will include the likely return of regular-season and postseason games to NBC. NBC Universal announced its plans to launch a sports network. In that announcement, it seemingly confirmed that MLB will be a part of it.
In a press release on November 13, NBC Sports announced that it would be resurrecting NBC Sports Network (NBCSN), which will be available exclusively to pay-TV and streaming services. YouTube TV and Xfinity will be the first to broadcast the channel on November 17, with other distributors to follow.
NBCSN will air spillover sports content from Peacock. As of now, Premier League and select NBA games currently air on NBC’s streaming service.
The network will air much of NBC’s sports library, including the Olympics, soccer, college sports from the Big 10 and Big East, cycling, and WNBA games, among others. But on top of that, NBC stated that NBCSN is likely to air “dozens of MLB regular-season and select postseason games in a soon-to-be-announced agreement.”
In the summer, it was reported in the New York Times that NBC was vying for broadcast rights for Major League Baseball. NBC reportedly targeted the Sunday Night Baseball package of games previously controlled by ESPN. ESPN’s contract for those games ended in 2025.
The announcement indicated that NBCSN would have rights for not just regular-season games but also select playoff ones, as well. Under MLB’s previous agreement with Disney & ESPN, the latter also had rights to the Wild Card Round package.
This would not be NBC’s first foray into MLB broadcasting rights. NBC had rights to broadcast Sunday morning/early afternoon games from 2022-23, a package that’s been under The Roku Channel in each of the past two seasons. The vast majority of those games aired on Peacock, and very rarely, on NBC itself.
NBC was one of the league’s national TV broadcasters for decades, dating back to the mid-half of the 20th century when games were called by Curt Gowdy and Tony Kubek. It had rights to the World Series as recently as 1999.
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