ESPN Sunday Night Baseball 2024 Season schedule: When do Yankees play in primetime?

If there's one guarantee in Major League Baseball's television schedule, it's that the Yankees and Red Sox will somehow wind up in showcase games as many times as the league can stuff them in there without receiving angry letters (and then a few times more than that).

It doesn't matter how the two teams are projected for the season. It doesn't mind if the rivalry's gone stale, or is getting lopsided. Once the Sox and Yanks start squaring off this summer, there's a good chance that most of their weekend sets end up amplified.

2024 will be -- say it with us now! -- NO DIFFERENT. ESPN's first batch of Sunday Night Baseball games dropped this week, and while New York and Boston don't face off until the weather's heated up, MLB made sure to sneak a Fenway game into their initial schedule release.

More information to come as the full slate is announced throughout the season, but while ESPN's 7:00 PM EST Sunday Night programming won't include the Yankees in April, national viewers will see them twice in the month of June.

Yankees on Sunday Night Baseball vs. Red Sox (of course), Dodgers back-to-back weeks

MLB continues to do its pig-headed strategy of saving all the Yankees-Red Sox matchups for the summer, leaving the season's first two months devoid of everyone's least favorite Sunday Night "scaries"-inducing activity. But rest assured, ESPN leapt at the very first chance they had to schedule New York and Boston in primetime, giving their mid-June series at Fenway the rivalry's typical treatment.

On June 9, fans will be able to watch the Yankees and Dodgers in the Bronx, a game that ESPN executives throughout the region are crossing their fingers includes Yoshinobu Yamamoto on the mound. They're also desperately hoping Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers does not attend. On June 16, follow the fun to Fenway, in a game that reportedly begins at 7:00 PM but, despite the pitch clock, still won't wrap until 1:12 AM.

Sunday Night Baseball's May slate is still empty, as ESPN and MLB likely wait to see how the early portion of the season plays out before flexing games into primetime on merit. Stay tuned for the rest of the spring and summer slate, as it's announced.