Today, in addition to announcing some new talent, the Chicago Cubs and Marquee Sports Network announced their Spring Training broadcast schedule. (Well, also the regular season schedule, but that one’s easy: all games that aren’t national games.)
This year, Marquee will air all Cubs home games in the spring, with some TBD-ness still attached to the road games. As you could no doubt surmise, the trick with trying to broadcast the road games this year is going to be the travel and personnel associated with pulling it off, given the pandemic protocols. Recall, last year during the regular season, broadcasts for road games were produced using local feeds upon which the home broadcasters applied their graphics and commentary. That way, a whole lot of human travel was cut down.
It’s *possible* there will be adjustments – these things are fluid, as always – but it’s most likely that Marquee will produce the home spring games like usual, but for road games, will have to pull the road feeds for broadcast purposes (whether on the channel, or the website, or both). And it may be, for the spring, that those feeds will simply be the full-on road feed – graphics and broadcasters and all. There is also always the MLB.tv option for those who can receive those feeds.
I’ll update when there’s more info on the road broadcasts, but for now, here’s the for-sure slate of Cubs Spring Training broadcasts on Marquee, with things kicking off on March 2: