Anthony Rieber: NBC's Peacock to show all 15 MLB games on 'Star-Spangled Sunday' event
Retired MLB player Anthony Rizzo works Mets-Phillies game as a broadcaster on June 21, 2026. Credit: Sipa USA via AP/Jess Stiles
Baseball fans who are tired of trying to figure out what channel the game is on will get a break of sorts on Sunday.
All 15 MLB games — including Mets at Atlanta and Twins at Yankees — will be on the streaming service Peacock. Two of the games (Mets-Atlanta and Dodgers-Padres) will also be broadcast on NBC.
Is this good for fans? It is if you already pay for Peacock.
It’s definitely good for NBC, which is calling the post July 4 event “Star-Spangled Sunday” and is touting that this is the first time all 15 MLB games will be aired nationally by one media company in a single day.
The day begins with Mets at Atlanta for a noon pregame with a 12:30 first pitch.
NBC will continue its practice of using local analysts as part of its broadcast crew. For the Mets game, play-by-play man Matt Vasgersian will be joined by Todd Zeile and Andruw Jones in the booth with former Yankee Anthony Rizzo providing “Inside the Pitch” commentary from the field.
Using local analysts and the “Inside the Pitch” feature (Adam Ottavino did it in the Mets’ Opening Day broadcast) are two of NBC’s innovations for its first season showing baseball on a regular basis since 2000.
For the most part, the new ideas have worked. NBC has done a good job of letting the games breathe rather than overwhelming the viewer with junk info (we see you, Apple TV — please, show me again what the expected hit probability is when Oswaldo Cabrera is batting).
Rizzo, who retired after the 2024 season, has been one of the breakout stars among the new wave of broadcasters who have gotten reps because there are so many platforms showing games now. Rizzo will be part of Netflix’s coverage of the Home Run Derby on July 13 (yes, the Home Run Derby is on Netflix now).
Rizzo will be joined for the Derby by, among others, CC Sabathia, who will also be featured as the “Inside the Pitch” person on NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” telecast of Dodgers-Padres this week.
The Yankees-Twins game at 1:30 will be on Peacock and will be called by Minnesota play-by-play man Cory Provus with Ottavino as the analyst and former Mets catcher Anthony Recker as sideline reporter (oh, yes, nearly all 15 games have sideline reporters; that's an "innovation" we could live without).
The challenge for NBC executives was to find 15 announcing crews plus all the other people and equipment it takes to air 15 games from 15 different cities. But this is what NBC signed up for when it re-upped with MLB and took over “Sunday Night Baseball” from ESPN this season in a three-year deal.
“When this event was announced,” NBC’s Rob Hyland told Newsday in a telephone interview, “I remember calling our executive producer Sam Flood and saying, ‘How are we doing this?’ with kind of a smile on my face . . . It really has required a ton of communication, reaching out to every local executive producer, doing deals with the announcers that work with those teams. These are calls that began in March and continued in April and in May and in June. It has been a tremendous effort by a lot of areas of NBC to pull this off.”
Hyland, a Manhattan native, is the coordinating producer of “Sunday Night Football” in addition to overseeing NBC’s MLB coverage. He’s going to be air traffic-controlling the broadcasts on Sunday from NBC’s Stamford, Connecticut, control center.
“I've never been a part of something like this,” Hyland said. “I've worked on a dozen Olympic Games, and those require a ton of communication . . . I would say it's similar to the Olympics. But nothing in America, nothing domestically, has looked like this for me in my career.”
One thing the network probably won’t repeat is what happened last week when honchos decided to delay the NBC broadcast of the Yankees-Red Sox Sunday night game in order to show the final round of the Travelers Championship golf tournament (the MLB game was available on Peacock until NBC picked it up in the bottom of the fourth.)
Was that good news for sports fans? It was for golf fans, maybe not for baseball fans.
But in the end it was definitely good news for NBC, which earlier this week reported that the Travelers drew the highest ratings for that tournament’s final round since 2002. Ratings peaked at 5.6 million viewers as co-leaders Scottie Scheffler and Viktor Hovland played the 18th hole from 8:15 to 8:27 p.m. while the Yankees and Red Sox battled it out at Fenway Park.
The baseball game, which featured Sonny Gray no-hitting the Yankees until the eighth inning and ended with a thrilling 5-4 Red Sox win in 10 innings, drew in 4.0 million viewers from 8:28 to 10:35 p.m. on NBC and Peacock.
It was the most-watched “Sunday Night Baseball” game in 15 years, NBC giddily reported.
So people obviously found it.
Anthony Rieber covers sports media and business and professional sports (you know, games and trades and things). He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since Jan. 1, 2026.
