Baseball

Like an ambitious butcher trying to cleave a dollar of meat out of a 10-cent steak, Major League Baseball announced on Thursday that it is carving out a bit more of its television broadcast rights, renewing its four-season-old deal for the “MLB Game of the Week Live on YouTube” with the Alphabet property. But unlike other recently struck deals, these streaming exclusives will be free to watch and without local blackout restrictions.

Beginning with the Rockies-Nats game on May 5th (first pitch 3:10 ET), YouTube will once again be home to more than a dozen MLB games throughout the 2022 season. Broadcasters Scott Braun and Yonder Alonso return to call the play-by-play. The full lineup is as follows:

• Washington Nationals at Colorado Rockies — Thursday, May 5 at 3:10 ET

• Milwaukee Brewers at Cincinnati Reds — Wednesday, May 11 at 12:35 ET

• Arizona Diamondbacks at Chicago Cubs — Friday, May 20 at 2:20 ET

• Detroit Tigers at Minnesota Twins — Wednesday, May 25 at 1:10 ET

• Kansas City Royals at Cleveland Guardians — Wednesday, June 1 at 1:10 ET

• Toronto Blue Jays at Kansas City Royals — Wednesday, June 8 at 2:10 ET

• Minnesota Twins at Seattle Mariners — Wednesday, June 15 at 4:10 ET

YouTubeTV subscribers will be able to find these games on the service’s dedicated Game of the Week channel while everybody else will see them on the MLB YouTube page. Fans will be able to interact with the broadcasts either via the live chat, “featuring game commentary from MLB superfan YouTube creators,” as well as in-game polls and, for subscribers, access to real-time game stats.  

The 2022 MLB season is riddled with exclusive broadcast deals. Beyond the standard local blackout rules, 18 Sunday games will be only available with a $10-a-month Peacock subscription, AppleTV+ ($6 a month) gets the Friday Doubleheaders, and ESPN has dibs on Sunday Night Baseball. There’s also MLB.TV which has rights to everything but is far more expensive than its alternatives, at least until the All-Star break.