2009 Major League Baseball season

The 2009 Major League Baseball season will begin on Sunday, April 5, 2009 with a game involving the 2008 World Series champion to be nationally telecast on ESPN2, as ESPN will be covering the 2009 Women's Final Four. The regular season, for which all teams' schedules were announced on September 17, 2008 in a historic first, will end on October 4 of the same year. The postseason is scheduled to begin three days later with the Division Series. The 2009 World Series will begin on October 28, and will end no later than November 5 (barring postponements due to weather), marking the second time the season will be completed in November; the only other time was in 2001, that due to the delaying of the end of that season because of the September 11 attacks. Homefield advantage for the Series will be decided at the All-Star Game on July 14 at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Missouri. In addition, the annual Civil Rights Game will become a regular season game, scheduled for June 20 at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati, Ohio when the host Cincinnati Reds play the Chicago White Sox in an interleague game.

tadium news

The 2009 season will mark the opening of two new stadia in New York City, Citi Field for the Mets and the new Yankee Stadium for the Yankees. They respectively replace Shea Stadium (which is being dismantled) and the original Yankee Stadium (of which the field will remain in a smaller stadium for high school and college use after reconstruction). Because of the smaller seating capacities in these new parks, Dodger Stadium will become the largest capacity park in use with 56,000 seats, and becomes the third oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball behind Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. Citi Field will open with a night game on April 13 as the Mets host the San Diego Padres; three days later, the Cleveland Indians will inaugurate New Yankee Stadium against the Bronx Bombers.

The forthcoming season will be the final season of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome as the home for the Minnesota Twins, where they have played since 1982. The team will move in 2010 to Target Field, their new baseball-only home facility. Previously since moving from Washington, DC in 1961, the franchise has shared first Metropolitan Stadium and then the Metrodome with the NFL's Minnesota Vikings; they also shared tenant rights at the Metrodome with the University of Minnesota's football team. The Golden Gophers will play on-campus at TCF Bank Stadium starting in 2009.

Television

This marks the first season in the USA for baseball games to be telecast as the transition from analog to digital television will be made on February 17.

There will be a new entrant in the baseball television rights marketplace debuting on January 1, as the self-owned MLB Network will join Fox, ESPN and TBS not only televising games, but also other baseball-related programming from their temporary home field (as it were) in Secaucus, New Jersey at the former home studios of MSNBC. Eventually, their studios will be based in the Harlem section of New York City, sharing space with Major League Baseball Productions and the Advanced Media division. The network will be the last of the four major team sports to start an in-house television channel. The national telecast breakdown is as follows, along with the maximum number of appearances per team:

* Fox: Saturday afternoon Game of the Week on a regional basis; eight appearances per team. In addition, the network will broadcast the All Star Game, the ALCS and World Series.
* ESPN/ESPN2: Sunday Night Baseball on a weekly basis; five appearances per team. In addition, there are games on Monday and Wednesday nights, with the Monday games moving to Friday nights when the 2009 NFL season begins, Opening Day games on April 6, and the State Farm Home Run Derby on July 13. ESPN Radio will also carry the Sunday Night games, as well as selected games through the season and the entire post-season.
* TBS: Sunday afternoon games starting on April 12; 13 appearances per team. In addition, the network will carry the announcement of the All-Star Teams in the National and American Leagues on June 29th as well as the Divisional Series and the NLCS as per the alternating contract with Fox.
* MLB Network: The network plans to carry a weekly Saturday Night Game of the Week starting April 11. No word on the limit of appearances any team can make as of yet.

In Canada, Toronto Blue Jays games will be televised on Rogers Sportsnet, TSN, and CBC. RSN also holds the Canadian rights to air the Fox and ESPN/ESPN 2 games if they do not conflict with Blue Jays games, as well as the All-Star Game and the entire postseason as well.

Uniforms, patches and caps

As per the openings of Citi Field and New Yankee Stadium and the egress of the Metrodome by the Twins, as well as the hosting of this season's All-Star Game by the Cardinals at Busch Stadium, those teams will wear special patches to commemorate these events.