For the first time in league history, part of Major League Baseball’s postseason will be unavailable to anyone without a paid streaming subscription. As part of NBC’s deal to acquire the entire Wild Card round, the White Sox-Astros and Cubs-Padres series will air exclusively on Peacock, with no traditional television broadcast option.
Fans who subscribe to YouTube TV have one workaround: the games can be streamed through NBCSN on the YouTube TV app, avoiding the need for a separate Peacock subscription. Otherwise, watching requires paying for Peacock directly, which runs from $8.99 to $19.99 per month, or $89.99 to $199.99 annually.
The move comes months after MLB required Netflix subscriptions to watch Opening Night and the Home Run Derby, a decision that already drew criticism from fans. Baseball audiences have historically been slower than other sports’ fan bases to accept streaming-only broadcasts, and the industry has long assumed MLB would be more cautious than leagues like the NFL about locking playoff games behind a paywall. Viewership numbers have generally backed that assumption — the Home Run Derby’s ratings on Netflix this June hit a 20-plus-year low.
By contrast, NFL streaming exclusives have found bigger audiences. Amazon Prime Video set an NFL streaming record last season with an average of 31.61 million viewers for the Packers-Bears Wild Card game, generating the highest single-day global viewership and the most concurrent streams in Prime Video history.
Why NBC, Not ESPN, Picked Up the Slack
Responsibility for the decision rests with MLB, not NBC. In past years, ESPN carried the Wild Card round across ESPN and ESPN2. NBC no longer runs a national cable sports channel and needs its broadcast network for local news, national news, and daytime programming, leaving Peacock as its only practical outlet for the remaining games.
MLB had other options. It could have sold NBC only the half of the Wild Card round that will air on the broadcast network, then licensed the rest to another TV partner — Fox or TBS, both current MLB rights holders, or even ESPN, which kept a smaller package this season. Instead, the league accepted a deal that puts entire series behind a streaming paywall.
The remainder of the postseason will still air on traditional television, split across Fox, FS1, and TBS, with streaming options available on FOX One for Fox and FS1 games and HBO Max for TBS games.
For fans who simply want to watch a game they’ve followed all season without adding another monthly subscription, the arrangement adds one more cost and one more login to an already crowded list of services required to watch live sports.
