The 2024 Major League Baseball regular season is going into extra innings, so to speak, as the Mets and Braves will still play Monday to determine the remainder of the National League playoff field. 

After the Braves and Mets had two games in Atlanta postponed last week due to Hurricane Helene, there were a variety of clinching scenarios over the weekend that could have eliminated the need for those games. But after the Diamondbacks salvaged on Sunday the final game of a three-game set with the Padres with an 11-2 win, the Mets and Braves will still play the rescheduled doubleheader. 

That Diamondbacks win—coupled with a victory by the Mets over Milwaukee and a loss by the Braves to the Royals on Sunday—creates a dramatic win-or-else scenario on Monday.

If the Mets and Braves split the doubleheader, both teams will reach the playoffs and Arizona will be eliminated. But if one team sweeps, the loser is out and the Diamondbacks will claim the final postseason slot—in turn heightening the drama for Game 2 as the Game 1 loser fights to secure their slot in what The Athletic’s Jayson Stark described as the “chaos scenario.” 

ESPN2 is set to carry both games nationally. Regardless of the various scenarios, though, the involved teams all face the potential of a tight turnaround with a game at either the Padres or Brewers on Tuesday.

“Before the year, nobody expected us to be in this position and here we are with a chance to do something special, and that’s what we’ll do,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said Sunday. “We’ll go back to Atlanta, we’ll get that last one, and we’ll go from there.”

Rest of the Field

The remainder of the MLB postseason field contains a mix of large-market juggernauts, upstart stories, and many of the sport’s biggest stars. 

• AL: The three divisions were won by the Yankees, Guardians, and Astros. Wild-card slots were claimed by the Orioles, Tigers, and Royals. The Tigers have been the league’s best team on the field since mid-August, in turn creating a surge in attendance, and are back in the playoffs for the first time in a decade. The Royals, meanwhile, rebounded from an ugly 106-loss season in 2023, and are still trying to close a deal on a new ballpark, with an 86-win campaign this year.
• NL: The three divisions there were won by the Phillies, Brewers, and Dodgers. The Padres have the top wild card slot clinched, regardless of the outcome of the Mets-Braves games on Monday. On this side of the postseason bracket, continuity is much more the story as the Dodgers won their 11th division title in 12 years, while the Brewers are in the playoffs for the sixth time in seven seasons, and the Phillies for the third straight year. 

The wild-card series begin Tuesday, while the division series round starts Saturday. 

All Eyes on Ohtani

Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani fell short on Sunday in his bid to win the Triple Crown, finishing second in batting average to Padres first baseman Luis Arraez. But Ohtani did complete a historic campaign with 54 home runs and 59 stolen bases, in turn becoming MLB’s first 50/50 player. 

Ohtani will be a focal point of MLB’s postseason, joining other major talents including the Yankees’ Aaron Judge, Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr., and Orioles’ Gunnar Henderson. 

MLB did not have either Ohtani or Judge in last year’s playoffs, and combined with the long decline of the Angels, the team of star outfielder Mike Trout, the league had gone the last decade without its unofficial “best player in the game” competing in the postseason.

Week 4 of the NFL regular season concludes with a second consecutive doubleheader, as ESPN’s biggest Monday Night Football season keeps pushing new boundaries, even if fans aren’t thrilled.

The Titans (0–3) visit the Dolphins (1–2) at 7:30 p.m. (all times ET) on ESPN, kicking off 45 minutes before ABC gets a much more desirable NFC matchup at 8:15 p.m.: the Seahawks (3–0) at the Lions (2–1). Last week, many NFL fans on social media voiced their criticism of the overlapping games, as the Bills beat the Jaguars 47–10 after a 7:30 pm. kickoff on ESPN, closely followed by the Commanders knocking off the favored Bengals 38–33, which started at 8:15 p.m. on ABC.

ESPN is paying the NFL an average of $2.7 billion per year under the league’s current $110 billion media-rights deals. For that steep price, there are a record 21 MNF games thanks to the continued increase in doubleheaders: four this year, up from three last season, and just one in 2022. 

On Oct. 21 in Week 7, the Ravens visit the Buccaneers for a standard 8:15 p.m. Monday night kickoff on ESPN, while Chargers at Cardinals begins at 8:45 p.m., and is an exclusive ESPN+ stream (another part of the NFL’s record streaming push). On Dec. 16 in Week 15, ABC has Bears-Vikings at 8 p.m., and ESPN has Falcons-Raiders at 8:30 p.m.

By the Numbers

More people are watching the NFL than at any point since 2015, so more Monday night games should only be a good thing for the league’s viewership, right?

Well, it’s complicated.

When  MNF doubleheaders take place, neither game draws as large an audience as it would on its own. So, ESPN touts the total average viewership in the roughly two-hour window when the games with staggered starts overlap.

Last week, that overlap figure was more than 19 million viewers. On its own, the more exciting Commanders-Bengals game averaged 13.2 million viewers on ABC, and Bills-Jaguars averaged 6.4 million on ESPN.

In 2023, two early-season MNF doubleheaders averaged 21.83 million viewers during their two-hour overlaps. Week 2 featured Saints-Panthers and Steelers-Browns, while Week 3 had Eagles-Buccaneers and Bengals-Rams. The 2023 MNF season average was 17.4 million viewers.

There was a twist in Week 14 last year when Packers-Giants and Titans-Dolphins both kicked off at 8:15 p.m. and collectively averaged 19.8 million viewers on ESPN platforms. That was the only doubleheader to have a ManningCast, which will appear only during the Week 7 doubleheader this season.

A merger between DirecTV and Dish Network, actively discussed at multiple points over the past two-plus decades and formally blocked by federal regulators in 2002, is once more nearing reality. If complete, the union would create the No. 1 pay-TV distributor in the U.S. and render significant impacts across sports media. 

The two carriers are now in advanced talks on a deal, according to multiple reports, to create a provider with nearly 20 million subscribers, easily outdistancing the roughly 13 million each held by current market leaders Comcast and Charter. The satellite TV deal would also include Sling TV, Dish Network’s well-known streaming television entity. Dish Network is a subsidiary of the Charlie Ergen-chaired EchoStar Corp., while DirecTV spun off from AT&T in 2021 into a separate entity. In addition to AT&T’s majority holding, DirecTV is partially owned by private equity giant TPG Inc. 

EchoStar stock rose nearly 9% on Friday, reaching its highest point in nearly three years, as a result of reports of the merger talks

Different Approaches to Sports

The deal, if it happens, would also bring together two companies that have employed rather different strategies in sports. Though DirecTV lost the residential rights to NFL Sunday Ticket last year, it still holds commercial distribution rights to the out-of-market games, and this summer made a significant push in soccer as the primary sponsor of a series of friendlies in the U.S. involving top European pro clubs. 

More recently, sports was a central component of DirecTV’s carriage negotiations with ESPN parent Disney, with the planned creation of sports-specific bundles for subscribers among the outcomes of the eventual deal. 

Dish Network, conversely, has taken a much harder line with sports networks. In recent years, the company has dropped all regional sports networks, conducted extended carriage and legal standoffs with several leagues and programmers, and placed channels such as MLB Network, NBA TV, and NHL Network on only its most expensive tiers. 

A Changed Market

When the Federal Communications Commission blocked an attempted DirecTV-Dish Network merger 22 years ago, a key part of the rationale then was a concern over the impact to consumers in rural areas, which back then were often not well-served by traditional cable. Since then, internet and pay-TV access through several technologies has mushroomed, and those more remote locales are not as singularly dependent on satellite TV. 

Additionally, the entire U.S. pay-TV business has lost nearly half its subscriber base since then, as the number of cord-cutters and cord-nevers grows at accelerating speed.

“It’s hard to imagine that regulators would block a deal,” MoffettNathanson principal analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a note to clients. “Better to have one [satellite TV operator] than none.”