While most teams were broadcast, emphasis was always on the league leaders and the major market franchises that could draw the largest audience.
In 1953, ABC-TV executive Edgar J. Scherick (who would later go on to create Wide World of Sports) broached a Saturday Game of the Week- baseball's first regular-season network telecast.
In April 1953, Scherick set out to acquire broadcasting rights from various major league clubs, but only got the Philadelphia Athletics, Cleveland Indians, and Chicago White Sox to sign on.
To make matters worse, Major League Baseball blacked out the Game of the Week on any TV stations within 50 miles of a ballpark.
Major League Baseball, according to Scherick, insisted on protecting local coverage and didn't care about national appeal.
In the rest of the United States, 3 in 4 TV sets in use watched Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blattner call the games for ABC.
Gene Kirby, who had worked with Dean and Blattner at ABC and Mutual radio, also contributed to the CBS telecasts as a producer and announcer.
ABC provided the first-ever nationwide baseball coverage with weekly Saturday broadcasts on a regional basis.
Chris Schenkel, Keith Jackson, and Merle Harmon were the principal play-by-play announcers for ABC's coverage.
Joe Garagiola was promoted to succeed Curt Gowdy as NBC's top play-by-play announcer in a team with color commentator Tony Kubek in 1976.
When NBC inked a new $550 million contract for six years in the fall of 1982, a return on the investment demanded Vin Scully to be their star baseball announcer.
There were even some who preferred the team of Kubek and Costas over the musings of Vin Scully and the asides of Joe Garagiola.
After Sandberg hit his second home run in the game (with two out in the bottom of the 9th to tie it 11–11), Costas cried "That's the real Roy Hobbs because this can't be happening!
Additionally, for the first time, NBC was able to feed the Game of the Week telecasts to the two cities whose local teams participated.
On December 14, 1988, CBS paid approximately $1.8 billion for exclusive over-the-air television rights for over four years beginning in 1990.
That game featured the Toronto Blue Jays beating the Baltimore Orioles 4–3 to clinch the AL East title from the SkyDome.
It was Game 5 of the 1989 National League Championship Series between the San Francisco Giants and Chicago Cubs from Candlestick Park.
NBC play-by-play man Bob Costas believed that a large bulk of the regular-season coverage beginning in the 1990s shifted to cable (namely, ESPN) because CBS did not really want the Saturday Game of the Week and that they were only truly after the marquee events (i.e. All-Star Game, League Championship Series, and the World Series) in order to sell advertising space (especially the fall entertainment television schedule).
In those two seasons, The Baseball Network (a joint venture by MLB, NBC and ABC) utilized a purely regional schedule of 12 games per week that could only be seen based on the viewer's local affiliate.
Unlike The Baseball Network arrangement, Fox reverted to the format of televising regular season games (approximately 16 weekly telecasts that normally began on Memorial Day weekend) on Saturday afternoons.
Like NBC and CBS before it, Fox determined its Saturday schedule by who was playing a team from one of the three largest television markets: New York City, Los Angeles, or Chicago.