National TV broadcast schedules are rolling out for 2025
There was a time — a glorious time of abundance and joy — when the rest of America was really, really sick of the Red Sox. The Sox were on TV all the time. The Yankees were, too. And it wasn’t unusual for an entire regular season series between the two teams to be nationally televised. “They should do it this way every year,” Jeff Passan once wrote of the Red Sox-Yankees clash that opened the 2010 season on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball. “[The MLB season should] open with the Red Sox and Yankees, to the chagrin, certainly, of the other 28 teams that already feel marginalized by the two leviathans but must understand that until Boston and New York stop layering classic on top of classic, they are the best draw in baseball.” I was in Beijing for that game, and I rose early in the morning to watch it with a co-worker. He was a fan of neither team, but he was a fan of baseball, and when the Red Sox and Yankees played each other, he made sure to watch, even from the other side of the world.
Fox alone put the Red Sox on national TV seven times that season, with two of those games coming against the Yankees. ESPN countered with six national broadcasts of Sox games on Sunday night, four of which involved the Yankees. There were 26 weekends on the baseball calendar that year, and the Sox were on national TV for nearly half of them. East coast bias was real and it was spectacular.
Those days appear to be gone.
ESPN recently announced its Sunday Night Baseball schedule for the first half of the 2025 season and it features the Red Sox just once, for the hotly anticipated(?) Chaim Bloom Bowl against the Cardinals in the second week of the season:
TBS will feature the Red Sox just twice in the first half of the year, for April and May match-ups against the Tigers and Mets, respectively.
But it isn’t only in random sports bars in the central timezone (or in Beijing) where it’ll be harder to find the Sox on TV this year. It’s going to be harder to watch them on TV here in New England, too.
As first reported by Chad Finn, Xfinity Cable has removed NESN (along with NBC Sports Boston) from its basic cable tier. Xfinity customers in New England who want to watch the Sox will now need to pay an additional $20 a month to do so. Xfinity’s move likely says more about the cord-cutting revolution in general than it does about the relative popularity of the Red Sox in particular — regional sports networks are expensive for cable companies to carry, and a lot subscribers ignore them entirely.
But it is nevertheless true that Red Sox ratings in NESN have plummeted in recent years. Sox games on NESN drew just a 2.47 rating last season (meaning that 2.47% of in-market households tuned into the game at some point), a number that was six percent lower than in 2023, and way lower than the glory years, when NESN ratings sometimes approached 20.
Maybe this doesn’t bother you. I’m not sure it bothers me. There was a time when I experienced a real and meaningful jolt of excitement when I heard the Sunday Night Baseball music playing over an overhead shot of Fenway. But those days are long gone — media saturation in general and A-Rod saturation with particular respect to Sunday Night Baseball have rendered them a distant memory. But what does bother me is the root cause of all of this: the Sox haven’t been on TV because the Sox haven’t been very good. Let’s fix that first.