For the first time in league history, Major League Baseball is putting postseason games exclusively behind a streaming paywall. As part of NBC’s acquisition of the entire Wild Card round, the White Sox-Astros and Cubs-Padres series will air only on Peacock, with no traditional television option.
YouTube TV subscribers have one workaround: the games can be streamed through the NBCSN channel inside the YouTube TV app, which could spare them the cost of a separate Peacock subscription. Everyone else will need to pay for Peacock directly, with plans ranging from $8.99 to $19.99 a month, or $89.99 to $199.99 a year.
This comes after MLB already required a Netflix subscription for Opening Night and the Home Run Derby earlier this year. That Home Run Derby broadcast on Netflix drew the lowest viewership in more than two decades for the event.
Baseball fans have historically been slower than fans of other sports to accept streaming-only broadcasts. The move onto Peacock tests that resistance directly, forcing fans who want to watch every postseason game to pay for yet another service on top of whatever cable or streaming package they already carry.
Why It Happened
The decision to lock the games behind Peacock rests with MLB, not NBC. NBC no longer runs a national cable sports network and needs its broadcast channel for local news, national news and daytime programming, leaving Peacock as the only outlet NBC had available for the remainder of the Wild Card round.
But MLB had other options. It could have sold NBC only the portion of the Wild Card round that airs on NBC’s broadcast network and licensed the rest to an existing rights holder such as Fox or TBS, or even ESPN, which still holds a smaller broadcast package this season. Instead, MLB chose to let Peacock carry those games exclusively.
The rest of the postseason will still air on television, spread across Fox, FS1 and TBS, with FOX One and HBO Max available for cord-cutters who want to stream those particular games. But the Wild Card round marks a line MLB had not crossed before.
For a league whose fans have long resisted paying extra just to watch their own team in the postseason, this is a new and unwelcome cost of following the game.
