As you certainly know, the Cubs are televising very few games this spring.
The good news, such as it is, is that going forward there are just two spring games remaining that will have no TV or radio coverage — Tuesday, March 10 at the Rangers, and Wednesday, March 11 vs. the Royals at Sloan Park. Of the other 17 remaining games (including the minor league Spring Breakout game), 10 will be televised, 15 will have a radio broadcast, and eight will have both.
For a generation of baseball fans who have
grown up expecting their team’s games to be broadcast on TV and radio, this obviously isn’t an acceptable state, even for Spring Training games. The Cubs and Marquee Sports Network got Cubs fans used to seeing nearly every spring game over the last five years, and so not having them this year has been kind of a shock.
The Cubs aren’t the only team that has cut back on spring TV. The Angels, for example, aren’t televising any of their Spring Training games. That’s largely because Angels TV broadcasts were part of the FanDuel Sports Networks, which collapsed this past offseason, with nine teams involved. The Angels didn’t get their TV broadcasts for the regular season organized until late February, and I suppose given that, it’s understandable that they didn’t do spring games.
The Brewers were in a similar situation, retaining their TV rights and creating “Brewers TV,” which will carry their regular-season games. You saw one of their broadcasts Wednesday, when the Cubs played them and Marquee carried that broadcast. Going forward, though, only five other Brewers spring games will be on TV, and two of those are the Spring Breakout games and one other is on MLB Network.
I’m not writing this to give the Cubs or MLB teams an excuse. They’ve created an expectation that their fans will be able to see all their games on TV. The last Cubs regular-season game that was not televised at all was more than 30 years ago, Monday, July 25, 1994. That was because MLB had created the “Baseball Network,” which carried a national game on Mondays and if your team wasn’t involved in those games, they were blacked out.
But that’s not the world we live in now. Fans want to see their team. MLB and its teams should consider Spring Training games as a “loss leader” of sorts. Yes, it’s relatively expensive to staff spring games with a camera crew and announcers, and there aren’t that many viewers on weekday afternoons in February and March.
Nevertheless, I believe MLB teams — part of an industry that had over $12 billion in revenue last year! — could afford some sort of simple bare-bones broadcast, something, anything that would get fans to tune in.
For example, take a look at Dansby Swanson’s two-run homer in Thursday’s game [VIDEO].
Thursday’s game at Sloan Park wasn’t televised — anywhere. But as you can see, there were two live cameras at Sloan Park, yes, not with camera operators and with what folks in the TV biz call “natural sound.” It’s not easy to follow the action that way.
But you know… people would watch that! There’s a graphic, as you can see, which shows the score, the count and the outs. Why couldn’t the Cubs just stream that? Absolutely people would watch — they could even sell between-inning ads on that feed to defray any streaming costs.
That’s what I would do. I don’t think Cubs management or MLB moguls realize how much their fans want to consume their Spring Training product. They should make it as accessible as possible.
Tonight, at least, there will be TV and radio coverage of the Cubs game vs. the Padres. It’ll be the Padres TV crew, available through MLB.TV and on MLB Network — no blackouts. There’s also a radio broadcast with the Padres radio announcers. That all starts at 8 p.m. CT.
And soon enough, the 2026 regular season will begin and every Cubs game (and every other MLB game) will be on TV and radio. MLB and its teams need to figure out a way to get every Spring Training game on TV and radio to fans who really do want to watch and listen.
