Major League Baseball is back and off to a fast start. The Atlanta Braves enter 2022 as the defending World Series champs but lost their longtime first baseman, Freddie Freeman, and are already below .500 early in the season. The St. Louis Cardinals have grabbed the lead in the NL Central, while the Los Angeles Dodgers are preseason World Series favorites and certainly look like the team to beat in the NL West.

The Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Toronto Blue Jays and Tampa Bay Rays are all bunched together out of the gate in the crowded AL East, while the Chicago White Sox have the early lead in the AL Central. The Houston Astros may have made it to the World Series last year from the AL West, but the Los Angeles Angels feature two of the best players in the game, three-time AL MVP Mike Trout and reigning AL MVP and two-way marvel Shohei Ohtani. 

Baseball fans have many ways to livestream their favorite team’s games this season without subscribing to cable, but the best option for one fan might not work for another. Selecting the right for watching baseball greatly depends on which team you follow and where you live. Veteran baseball streamers will note new options for 2022, including  and , as well as  and a handful of . 

Live TV streaming service vs. MLB.TV

There are two major ways to stream MLB games day in, day out without a cable or satellite TV subscription:

• Subscribe to a such as DirecTV Stream or YouTube TV.
• Subscribe to .

Depending on where you live, one of the major live TV streaming services could carry the channel that has your favorite team. Those channels, called regional sports networks, deliver almost all of the regular-season games live. 

Most such services, however, carry only a handful of the 30 RSNs that show MLB games — and they’re typically the most expensive. DirecTV Stream carries the most RSNs, but you’ll need to spring for its $90-a-month plan; its basic $70-a-month plan doesn’t include RSNs. Sling TV, a service that costs $35 a month, doesn’t have any RSNs for baseball. If you’re a baseball fan who needs your team’s RSN, a cable subscription might actually be cheaper than streaming.

The other option is , a separate service that carries every game played by every team live. It’s great for hard-core fans in general. MLB.TV costs $130 for the season or $25 a month.

The big catch with MLB.TV is the local blackout restriction: You can’t watch your local team’s games live. Instead, they become available about 90 minutes after the game ends. If you’re a Yankees fan in the New York area, for example, you can’t start to watch the Yankees game until an hour and a half after the final out. Other teams’ games aren’t blacked out live, which makes MLB.TV ideal for fans who want to follow one or more of the 28 or 29 teams based in other cities, aka out-of-market teams.

DirecTV Stream: Best for fans of the home team

Due to MLB.TV’s blackout restriction, a live TV streaming service is the best bet for following your local team. Many services carry the RSN that has exclusive rights to every regular season game, but availability varies by location and service. 

In addition to the RSNs listed below, live TV services carry most if not all of the major national networks — ESPN, Fox, FS1, MLB Network and TBS — that regularly televise matchups from different teams around the league. Details are at the top of this article.

Here’s how the RSNs stack up on each service.