The 2026 baseball season opened last night in San Francisco, where the New York Yankees beat the Giants 7-0 in a game broadcast exclusively on Netflix. The phrase "exclusively on Netflix" is doing considerable work in that sentence. It means that if you are the kind of person who watches Opening Day on television — the kind of person baseball claims to want — you needed a streaming subscription to a company best known for true crime documentaries to see the first pitch of the year. [1]

Eleven games follow today. The marquee matchup is Pittsburgh at the New York Mets, airing on NBC, featuring Paul Skenes against Luis Peralta. It is a genuinely compelling pitching duel. You can watch it if you have NBC, which you might, depending on which of the several tiers of Peacock you subscribe to, or whether your cable package still includes broadcast networks, or whether you have given up on the entire enterprise and are following along on your phone. [2]

This is baseball's existential texture in 2026. The sport that once defined the American afternoon — the game your grandfather watched on the television set with the rabbit ears — now requires a spreadsheet to determine where a given game will be broadcast. Dave Portnoy, whose complaints about sports tend to go viral regardless of their merit, captured the sentiment within hours: "MLB opening day should be afternoon games in America. Only the MLB could screw that up." The post drew hundreds of replies, most of them agreeing.

The broadcast fragmentation is not an accident. It is a strategy. MLB sold exclusive windows to Netflix, Apple TV+, Amazon, and Peacock because each platform paid a premium for content that forces subscribers to maintain their memberships. The economics work for the league and the platforms. They do not work for the viewer who wants to watch baseball.

On Reddit, the reviews of last night's Netflix broadcast were characteristically blunt. "Presented by Netflix through a layer of Vaseline" was the consensus on the video quality. The stream ran at a lower bitrate than traditional broadcasts, producing a slightly soft image that anyone accustomed to regional sports networks could identify immediately.

The season opens under conditions that have nothing to do with baseball and everything to do with the country watching it. Gas is above four dollars. A war is entering its fourth week. The economy is unstable enough that a three-trillion-dollar market swing constitutes a normal Tuesday. Baseball has always been the sport Americans use to pretend everything is fine. The pretending is getting harder.

Seven-nothing, Yankees. Play ball.

-- Maya Calloway, New York