Major League Baseball (MLB) games aired on the predecessor networks for the American pay television channel Freeform. These began in 2000, when the channel was known as Fox Family Channel, co-owned by News Corporation and Haim Saban, as a replacement for Thursday night games that had aired on Fox Sports Net in prior seasons. The package also included some games in the postseason Division Series. After The Walt Disney Company bought the channel in 2001, renaming it to ABC Family, the games were moved to the Disney-owned ESPN channels, although the 2002 Division Series games that had been acquired as part of the purchase remained on ABC Family because of existing contractual obligations. Those games moved to ESPN the following year as well.
Background
In 1997, as part of its contract with Major League Baseball, Fox Sports began to show games on its national network of regional sports networks, Fox Sports Net (FSN), which was given rights to two Thursday night games per week, one for the Eastern and Central time zones and one for the Mountain and Pacific time zones, though these games were often preempted in markets where they conflicted with the FSN affiliate's coverage of a local team.
In 2000, the former FSN coverage passed to Fox Family Channel on an alternating basis with then-sister network FX and was reduced to one game per week.[6][7]
After Disney bought Fox Family in 2001 and renamed it ABC Family,[22] the Thursday games were folded into the ESPN Major League Baseball rights package (and subsequently shifted to weekday afternoon "DayGame" broadcasts). However, the Division Series games aired on ABC Family (with ESPN's announcers, graphics, and music) for 2002 because of inherited contractual obligations.[23][24][25] The only usage of the ABC Family "bug" was for a ten-second period when returning from a commercial break in the lower right corner of the screen.[26] The following year the Division Series games also shifted to ESPN.
Game 2 (played on October 2) of the Minnesota–Oaklandplayoff series in 2002 started on ESPN2 because the San Francisco–Atlanta game (which started at 1 p.m. Eastern Time) ran over the three-hour time window. The game was eventually switched back to ABC Family once the early game ended.[27]
