Phillies And Braves Gave Us Quite A Show In Game 1. Too Bad MLB Made It Hard To Watch

This article was written by Jason Foster and published on Sport & State, a new media company founded by Clay Travis that is built around sports, culture, original voices, and live conversation.

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ATLANTA — The Phillies and Braves kicked off the 2026 MLB postseason on Tuesday with a pretty good show in Game 1 of their NL Wild Card Series, if you were blessed enough to catch it.

We saw several innings of a classic pitchers’ duel between two exceptional lefties, one a future Hall of Famer and the other a budding superstar. We saw one of those lefties, Atlanta’s Chris Sale, gas another future Hall of Famer, Philadelphia’s Bryce Harper, with a 100 mph heater for a big strikeout, one of Sale’s career postseason-high nine on the day.

We also saw big hits. We saw unexpected heroics. We saw multiple lead changes, the biggest coming when Braves third baseman Austin Riley redeemed his season with a huge three-run go-ahead homer in the eighth inning, his biggest hit in years. Drama from start to finish.

AUSTIN RILEY
GO-AHEAD THREE-RUN HOMER
ATLANTA IS GOING WILD ???? pic.twitter.com/XrPQnazvVO

— MLB (@MLB) September 29, 2026

Yes, the Braves’ 5-3 win in Game 1 was pretty much exactly what you want a postseason game to be. But there’s an excellent chance that you missed a lot of it because it started at 2:15 p.m. ET, right in the middle of the school and work days, and finished a bit before 5 p.m., just as traffic arteries in Philadelphia and Atlanta were mid-clog.

So, unless you were among the 30,127 at Truist Park who paid to see it in person, your Game 1 experience was likely limited to sneaky peeks on your phone when the boss or teacher wasn’t looking. And you get to do it all again for Game 2 on Wednesday.

In other words, this is a swing and miss by MLB’s schedulers as mighty as Harper’s whiff on Sale’s 100 mph cheese.

“Shame on you, Major League Baseball. This can’t happen.”

The Phillies and Braves started at 2 p.m. ET on Tuesday and are scheduled to start at the same time on Wednesday and Thursday.@ClayTravis hammers MLB for scheduling Wild Card games in the middle of the workday. pic.twitter.com/JU9ttagsqx

— Sport & State (@SportNState) September 29, 2026

Early-afternoon games in the first round of the postseason are nothing new, of course. But a series between two marquee teams who also happen to be major rivals — one with a significant national following and the other residing in the country’s fifth-largest TV market — should not be relegated to matinee status.

That’s especially true when a much better time slot, 5 p.m. ET, was available but given to the AL Wild Card matchup between the White Sox and Astros, two mediocre teams that averaged just 82.5 wins and wouldn’t have even reached the postseason if they played in the NL.

You can argue that the Chicago TV market (third in the U.S.) is larger than Philly’s (fifth), and Houston’s (sixth) is bigger than Atlanta’s (seventh). That’s all true, but a team’s market size is not the same as its popularity — and it’s definitely not the same as its quality. The Phillies and Braves are objectively better teams than the White Sox and Astros, and it’s not close. Their matchup was much more compelling before the game even started. That the game turned out to be a thriller only underscores the point.

Obviously, with four games on Tuesday, one of them had to get the early slot. There’s no way around that, and two fan bases were going to be less than thrilled no matter what. MLB is well aware of this and tries to maximize broadcast windows with minimum overlap, taking into account the time zones of the teams involved, the expected draw and more. But, clearly, there’s room for improvement.

Nobody expected Phillies-Braves to get the sweet 8 p.m. ET slot that went to the Red Sox and Yankees, and certainly nobody wanted the 10 p.m. ET slot reserved for the Cubs and Padreson the West Coast. But the 5 p.m. ET slot that housed the throughly mid White Sox and Astros? That’s a much better option for the heft of the Phillies-Braves series, with the much-less-hefty White Sox-Astros series moving to the 2 p.m. ET window (1 p.m. in their time zones).

Do the players even care? Well …

Now, admittedly, this complaint is mostly made with fans in mind because MLB should want its best games in front of the maximum number of eyeballs. And, sure, you can certainly argue that if a game means that much to a fan base, its members should make the necessary arrangements to watch it. But that’s just not feasible for many people who can’t afford to take a day off, can’t afford tickets, can’t afford to miss a meeting or appointment, or can’t afford to spend work time watching a TV instead of doing their jobs. MLB can do better with these games.

It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t nearly as big a deal to players, who tend not to care much about start times in the postseason. With all the butterflies and adrenaline that come with it, they’re usually just eager to get it going. I’ll let Sale explain it:

“I could have pitched this game at 8:15 this morning,” he told reporters after Tuesday’s game, his first postseason appearance since 2021. “I felt like one of those scary movies. My eyes were open and I just popped out of bed and I was just — it was one of those weird situations where sometimes you have a night game and you feel like you’re waiting all day to play. It felt like I was warming up and I looked up and I’m like holy — it felt like it was 5 o’clock by the time I started getting ready to run out on the field.”

Sale’s teammates aren’t going to lose any sleep over the afternoon start times. Neither will the Phillies. That’s meant metaphorically, of course, because, ironically, they’ll all have to wake up earlier than normal for the games on Wednesday and, possibly, Thursday.

But a win is a win for any team in the postseason. They don’t care how it comes. The Braves produced a good one Tuesday. Too bad more of their fans couldn’t see it.

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