Syndication: Lansing State Journalon 08/13/2026
08/13/2026
Major League Baseball has revealed the dates for the 2026 MLB postseason, and a new report is showing how the television arrangements will look in NBC’s first season covering the Wild Card Round.
According to Sports Media Watch, the NBC broadcast network will air two games per day during the Wild Card Round, with NBCSN and Peacock exclusively airing the remaining games.
That’s a pretty significant difference from the arrangement from 2022 to 2025, when the round aired on ESPN networks. With ESPN, three of the four games aired on cable, with one afternoon game airing on ABC.
It remains to be seen how NBC will schedule those games. ESPN used several different scheduling strategies, with the ABC game being in the afternoon the only constant. The only time NBC has aired a doubleheader of games on a weekday was Opening Day, with Pirates-Mets at 1 p.m. and Diamondbacks-Dodgers at 8 p.m.
MLB’s full postseason schedule <a href="https://www.mlb.com/news/2026-mlb-playoff-and-world-series-schedule” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>announcement shows no major changes from 2025. The Wild Card Series will run from Tuesday, September 29, to Thursday, October 1. The Division Series begins on Saturday, October 3, and Game 7 of the World Series is scheduled for Saturday, October 31.
The expansion of over-the-air NBC broadcasts comes while MLB has greatly expanded the number of over-the-air postseason broadcasts its partners have aired in recent years. In 2019, prior to the World Series, only one postseason game aired broadcast television: Game 2 of the Yankees-Astros ALCS. Last year, that number rose to eight games. With two games guaranteed to air on broadcast every day during the Wild Card Series, that number could rise even further in 2026.
At the same time, the two other Wild Card Series games, for all intents and purposes, will be the first MLB postseason games ever exclusive to streaming. To be fair, NBCSN does have some limited carriage onYouTube TV, Xfinity andFuboTV, but it is a far cry from the widespread carriage of ESPN and ESPN2.
Unlike the NBA postseason, which saw streaming exclusives on Peacock and Prime Video spread throughout the tournament, the MLB Wild Card Series and its streaming exclusives will only last at most three days, which provides a much smaller incentive for fans to subscribe. Even with the expanded over-the-air broadcasts in recent years, the vast majority of MLB postseason games outside of the Wild Card will be on cable
So, it seems that NBC’s entrance to the Wild Card Series will be a mixed bag for baseball fans. Two games will be widely available on NBC, while the other two will be relegated to NBCSN or Peacock.
