Missed Opportunities

By Brad Hubbard | 6/2/2024

Memorial Day 2024 and not a single nationally televised Major League Baseball (MLB) or Major League Soccer (MLS) game on television. Seems odd doesn’t it? 

Now the latter I can live with but the former…really? Was there something else happening on Memorial Day on television that was better than a baseball game to kick off the unofficial start to summer? While still spring, and there will inevitably be weather somewhere across this great land that will force people back indoors where they will usually turn on the old boob tube. Did we officially surrender to streaming channels like NETFLIX and HULU to entertain us vs a nationally televised baseball game on Memorial Day? We may be a divided country but surely we could agree upon a baseball game during the afternoon of Memorial Day. 

Of the 11 MLB games scheduled on Memorial Day, all but one had an afternoon start time (before 5pm local time). One game was postponed due to weather. One game was streamed on ESPN+ (Philadelphia at San Francisco) but none of the others were shown to a national audience. 

As someone over the age of 30, this takes me by surprise. Someone could always make the argument that these games weren’t “good enough” but when have TV executives ever cared about that? The Dodgers were in New York to play the Mets (in a game that was postponed due to weather) so even with the two biggest TV markets in the country, Disney nor FOX thought that putting an MLB game on TV was a good idea. 

On a quick side note, MLS missed this opportunity but did screw it’s head on well enough to have a full slate of games the day after the MLB All-Star game which is on July 16th. 

It’s pretty shocking when you think about it to see MLB fall so far as to NOT have a nationally televised game on a major summer holiday. Sure there may be some contract reason why they didn’t have a game on national TV that afternoon but even that isn’t a good enough reason in my book. Maybe next year they’ll get it right or maybe less and less people will care.