In 2021, as baseball returned to a 162-game schedule after the pandemic, many teams, including the Cubs, began to move their night game starting time before 7 p.m. local time. The 7 p.m. (0r 7:05 or 7:10) had been a standard night-game starting time in baseball for at least 30 years before that.
The Cubs are now beginning night games at 6:40 p.m. local time in April, May and September, but keeping the first pitch at 7:05 p.m. in June, July and August (except for a few national TV dates in those months
in the 6 p.m. CT hour).
Before I get into more on this, here’s a bit of night game history.
When night baseball first began to become widespread in MLB in the 1940s (except, of course, for lightless Wrigley Field, which didn’t have night games until 1988), many teams began night games at 8:30 p.m. local time.
Why was that? First of all, the lights weren’t as good as they are now (especially with LED lighting in most parks including Wrigley), so playing at dusk didn’t provide sufficient light. Also, some teams felt that people would prefer to go to dinner and then come to a ballgame, sort of the “dinner and a show” idea that many people had in going out to dinner and a theater. Also, back then most games could finish in not much more than two hours, so they wouldn’t end too late, and with fewer people living in suburbs and most coming to games on public transit, getting home late wasn’t a real issue.
By the 1960s most teams had moved night game starts to 8 p.m. local time. Famously, Sandy Koufax’s perfect game against the Cubs at Dodger Stadium in 1965 began then, but still ended before 10 p.m., as it ran just one hour, 43 minutes. That doesn’t really happen anymore.
In the 1970s night game start times began to be shifted to 7:30 p.m. local and in the 1980s to 7 p.m., which is where the Cubs come in. When night baseball began at Wrigley Field in 1988, 7:05 was the standard start time (with a handful at 6:30, including this memorable April 1989 game played in frigid conditions and the Cubs and Padres combined to make 11 errors).
And that leads us to the present day, and I’m writing this largely because of this detailed article by Mike Mazzeo in Sports Business Journal on the topic of earlier night game starts, where the headline reads: ‘Never had more positive feedback’: Inside MLB’s race to beat 7 p.m.
Inside the article are facts and quotes from a number of different teams about their moving night game starting times to 6:40 or 6:45 p.m. local time. Many of them have gone to this all season. Here’s a chart from the article that I found quite illuminating (data through May 2026):
You’ll see the effect of the pitch timer there too, where the number of games ending before 10 p.m. local time jumped significantly from 2022 to 2023. But the number of night games beginning before 7 p.m. local time also rose, from 42 percent in 2021 to 76 percent this year. This sums up my feelings about the earlier start time:
“When we moved our start time to 6:40 p.m., I’ve never had more positive feedback on anything from our season-ticket holders,” John Weber, the Phillies’ senior vice president of ticket operations and a 25-year club executive, told Sports Business Journal. “I couldn’t imagine playing a game at 7:05 right now.”
The article continues with more interesting charts on how teams have split up their starting times. Of course, the Cubs, with their limitations on total night games, play more day games than anyone else, but you can also see they’re part of the trend in moving night games earlier, with about half of theirs in 2026 scheduled to begin before 7 p.m.
This is from the White Sox, but also relevant to Chicago in general:
The White Sox solicited feedback before arriving at an optimal pre-7 p.m. first pitch. Unlike the Guardians, the 6:10 p.m. weekday start time did not grade out well when the White Sox polled season-ticket holders and select individual fans, said Brooks Boyer, executive vice president and chief revenue and marketing officer. The clear winner was 6:40 p.m., significantly ahead of 7:10 p.m.
“Part of that is the traffic that we have in Chicago, people just didn’t want to fight that,” Boyer said.
I asked Gene Schafer, a fellow Cubs season-ticket holder who comes to more than half the games every year and has a fairly long drive to Wrigley Field, which time he prefers. Here’s what he told me:
I’m in the southwest suburbs, so it’s a pretty good trip in both directions. I’ve joked that it would be nice to have the 7:05 start time with the 6:40 end time. But those extra few minutes when I get home can make an outsized difference. Especially when I have work in the morning.
And that’s the key to all of this, I think — getting people home earlier. Obviously the pitch timer has helped considerably, knocking about 35 minutes off the average game time. Tack on an extra 25 minutes by moving start times from 7:05 to 6:40 and, well, an hour earlier is pretty significant.
The article also contains this comment from a Cubs executive:
Cubs Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Officer David Cromwell said the club has offered a school-night special since moving some games earlier, bundling a ticket with a hot dog and non-alcoholic beverage.
“It’s more family-friendly, more kid-friendly the earlier start time during that school-year period, and our fans have been really positively responsive to that,” Cromwell said.
While all that is certainly true, and a good thing for the Cubs to do, getting kids home earlier in the summer wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. This year, the Cubs have the following scheduled night game start times (the three outliers are times mandated by national TV):
6:40: 19
7:05: 16
6:15: 2
7:30: 1
As you can see, the majority of Cubs night games start in the 6 p.m. hour. Thus I’m going to conclude this article by saying that starting next year, the Cubs should pick up on this trend and move all their night game starting times to 6:40 p.m. CT (obviously, excepting what’s mandated by national TV). It’s a trend in the industry that fans seem to like, and it’s worth doing on the North Side of Chicago, too.
