Coming soon,
Saturday night baseball
This spring Fox will air Major League games
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Feb 4, 2010
Sports may well be the future of Saturday night.
Three and a half years after ABC pumped up its fall ratings with a series of Saturday evening college football games, Fox is testing out a pair of Major League Baseball games in primetime, marking the first time since 2004 that regular-season games have aired in primetime on broadcast.
The network said yesterday that it will air regionalized matchups at 7 p.m. on May 22 and June 26, two interleague play dates that will feature some marquee matchups.
The May 22 game will be the New York Yankees-New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies-Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs-Texas Rangers or Detroit Tigers-Los Angeles Dodgers.
The June 26 game will feature the Los Angeles Dodgers at the Yankees, the Red Sox at the San Francisco Giants, and the Cubs playing the Chicago White Sox.
Fox and MLB said they had been mulling the scheduling change for some time.
If the games perform well in primetime, it's not hard to imagine more of them popping up in the future, especially as the networks struggle to draw viewers on the night.
Fox, with its lineup of crime-fighting reality shows "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted," is the only Big Four network to air original programming on the night. It usually leads among adults 18-49, while the other networks generally air reruns.
But sports programming has performed very well on Saturday nights in the past. Fox's World Series drew 15.4 million viewers in October, and NFL playoff games on NBC and CBS drew more than 30 million viewers apiece last month.
ABC's "Saturday Night Football," while drawing many fewer viewers, often performs well enough to win among younger demos.
Fox is not the first network to experiment with sports on Saturday. CBS has tested a couple of mixed martial arts matches, which have performed well with men 18-34 but not produced huge numbers overall.
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