Time without baseball can be tough, especially when there’s emptiness where the opening week of the MLB season should be.
For that, Major League Baseball is helping fill the void while COVID-19 puts a pause in the action with free streamed games. For a limited time, MLB will allow fans to stream over 4,800 games from the 2018 and 2019 seasons including playoff action. Fans will be able to watch all the games for free on MLB.TV. MLB Network will also get in on the action showing a collection of the leagues’ 20 greatest games and World Baseball Classic match-ups.
The MLB Vault page on YouTube can take fans even farther back including Ichiro Suzuki‘s 3,000th hit and the magical 2016 campaign by the Chicago Cubs. The list of archived games includes regular and postseason battles dating back to 1952.
What’s Coming Up
On Sunday, March 22, MLB Network will be airing twelve straight hours of World Baseball Classic programming. It comes on the three-year anniversary of the 2017 World Baseball Classic final. The coverage will begin at 11 A.M. Eastern Time and will span the day with best-ever World Baseball Classic games. Beginning at 8 P.M., fans can go back in time with Team USA and their shutout victory over Team Puerto Rico in the final battle.
MLB’s efforts join up with the efforts set in place by the NFL, FIFA, and NBA in providing fans with something to take in while sports as a whole is put on hold. That will come in handy across all baseball fans as the originally scheduled Opening Day date of March 26 will come to pass without a hint of baseball action.
Earlier this month, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred closed Spring Training and all camps associated with the leagues’ preseason action. Then the start of the season was pushed back by two weeks, but now the date that baseball actually picks back up is still up in the air. The Center for Disease Control has since recommended no gatherings of 50 or more people for the next eight weeks.
Main Photo: Embed from Getty Images
