Major League Baseball announced game times for the full 2026 schedule this week, which includes a 5:30 p.m. PT start for the Dodgers on opening day against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Dodger Stadium. That game will be televised exclusively by NBC and streamed on Peacock.
NBC’s coverage on March 26 begins at 5 p.m. PT, and on Thursday the network announced that Bob Costas will return to NBC Sports to host that pregame show, as well as the pregame show for the network’s Sunday Night Baseball telecasts during the season.
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“As appreciative as I am of other aspects of my career, especially HBO and the MLB Network, for 40 years, my true broadcasting home was NBC,” Costas said in a press release.
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Joshua Rodrigues at Baseball Prospectus looked at bat speed aging curves in relation to some of the bigger free agent contracts this offseason. Kyle Tucker, having just turned 29 and signed a contract that will last a maximum of four years, is less likely to decline precipitously during this deal with the Dodgers, Rodrigues argues.
“He’s still operating within a window where modest growth is reasonable before settling into a long-term plateau,” Rodrigues wrote. “From a bat speed perspective, he profiles as a player who should age into a stable, roughly league-average range rather than fall off a cliff.”
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Rob Mains at Baseball Prospectus analyzed Tucker’s $240 million Dodgers contract, noting that Tucker will actually earn more than had he simply been paid $60 million per year in salary. That’s largely because Tucker got a $64 million signing bonus and $30 million in deferred salaries, which are both taxed in a player’s state of residence, and there’s no state income tax in Florida.
Blake Snell wears number seven with the Dodgers, and new closer Edwin Díaz will wear number three in Los Angeles. Michael Baumann at FanGraphs wrote about the recent upswing of single-digit numbers worn by pitchers, and he hates it aesthetically.
“The pitcher is the only player in baseball — maybe the only athlete in all of team sports — who spends most of the game with his back to the TV camera,” Baumann wrote. “And pitchers are big dudes, by and large; even a skinny two-digit number, like 11, feels inadequate for a pitcher’s broad thorax.”
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