Monday Night Baseball was born on October 19, 1966, when NBC signed a three-year contract to televise the game.

This brought the total value of the contract (which included three Monday night telecasts each season) up to $30.6 million.

September 1, 1975 saw NBC's last Monday Night Baseball game, in which the Montreal Expos beat the Philadelphia Phillies 6–5.

Curt Gowdy called the Monday night games with Tony Kubek from 1972 to 1974, the pair being joined in 1973 and 1974 by various guest commentators from both in and out of the baseball world.

ABC would pick up the television rights for Monday Night Baseball games in the following year.

The team owners liked that arrangement, as the ABC games didn't compete against their stadium box offices and local telecasts.

The network, on the other hand, found the arrangement far more complicated; ABC often had only one or two games to pick from for each telecast from a schedule designed by Major League Baseball.