The World Series will start a day earlier this year.
Major League Baseball released its 2014 playoff schedule on Thursday, with the World Series set to begin on Tuesday, October 21. The new date allows MLB to avoid the new Thursday Night Football NFL games on CBS as well as Monday Night Football on ESPN.
With that said, it also means that Games 3 and 4 will air on Friday and Saturday, respectively, the two lowest rated nights of the week. Before MLB only had to contend with a Saturday night game.
This year’s postseason will be marked by a series of changes mandated by the new television deal. ESPN will air the National League Wild Card game on October 1 (not September 30 as previously reported here), marking its first MLB playoff telecast since 2006.
Fox Sports 1 will air most of the N.L. Division and Championship Series, including a potential Game 7 of the NLCS. The only N.L. playoff games not on FS1 will be the aforementioned Wild Card game (ESPN), a Game 2 and Game 3 in the Division Series (MLB Network) and Games 1 and 6 of the NLCS (FOX). The two NLCS games on FOX will air on Saturday nights and serve as the only games on broadcast TV before the World Series.
TBS, which until this year aired the entire Division Series, will air only the American League games this year. The network kicks off the postseason with the A.L. Wild Card game on September 30.