A headline from this website in February of each of the past three years:
- 2023: Orioles announce embarrassingly paltry spring training broadcast schedule
- 2024: MASN announces another paltry spring schedule
- 2025: Orioles announce another year’s pathetic spring training broadcast schedule
They were nothing if not consistent. Along with revealing a sad, single-digit number of spring games to be broadcast, they also waited until pretty much the last minute to do it. The pattern has finally been broken in 2026, with the Orioles on Thursday – more than a month ahead of the first spring game! – announcing that there will be 20 spring training games broadcast on MASN this year. 20 games!
My Camden Chat colleague Stacey
noted earlier today that this is more games than were broadcast in the past three spring training seasons combined. That’s a real sea change, even if, Baltimore Baseball’s Rich Dubroff reported, all but one of the games will have the broadcasters at home in Baltimore to do the coverage. It’s a big step in the right direction. Fans and broadcasters still deserve better.
From the first spring training game on February 20 to the final exhibition against the Nationals in Washington on March 23, there are 30 days that will have the Orioles play a game. Including games that will be broadcast on the radio, 23 of those days will have home coverage. You can check the Orioles official schedule to see which spring games have a TV or radio broadcast.
We will actually get to participate in the spring ritual that other teams fans have done for a number of years, of seeing the lineup gradually take shape and of seeing the prospects who will hopefully be appearing in the next couple of years getting time early on in camp. I’m excited about it. Watching other team spring broadcasts, when available, is not a substitute. Those crews don’t know much and care even less about what’s going on with the Orioles, who the younger players appearing might be and what their stores are, or anything that an Orioles fan would care about.
It’s probably not a coincidence that this broadcast schedule was announced precisely one day after the long-simmering Orioles-Nationals MASN divorce was finally made official. At The Baltimore Banner, Andy Kostka wrote that “part of the change is down to the Nationals departing MASN this week,” although there’s nothing to indicate what considerations are different now.
As long as the Nationals were around, the network had to offer equal coverage to those two teams and it seems due to either economic factors or spite, now that they are out of the picture, the network is willing to do more, even if “more” still isn’t as good as it should be. For this year, I’ll take the progress.
