NBC will open its Major League Baseball rights package with the Los Angeles Dodgers raising their World Series banner against the Arizona Diamondbacks on March 26, 2026, according to reports from The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand and Sports Business Journal’s Austin Karp and Mike Mazzeo.
The Dodgers are scheduled to open their 2026 season at home against Arizona, the earliest domestic Opening Day in franchise history. Twenty-eight of MLB’s 30 teams will begin their seasons that day, with the other 13 games scheduled before NBC’s primetime window.
Back in September, Puck’s John Ourand reported that NBC would receive a standalone primetime game on the second night of the season, with Pirates-Mets and Tigers-Padres mentioned as possibilities. The Dodgers’ banner-raising ceremony gives NBC a different kind of draw as it takes over Sunday Night Baseball from ESPN.
One day earlier, Netflix will stream Yankees-Giants on March 25 in what was originally NBC’s Opening Day game before negotiations shifted it to the streamer, which now owns those rights for the next three seasons. Netflix is also reportedly buying rights to the Home Run Derby, the Wild Card, and the Field of Dreams showcase in Iowa.
NBC’s package, which runs through 2028, also includes the Wild Card Round and Sunday Morning Leadoff games, which it reclaimed from Roku. The network last aired regular-season baseball when it briefly simulcast Peacock’s Sunday morning games in 2022 and 2023. Before that, NBC hadn’t broadcast MLB since the 2000 ALCS.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.