Fox is testing prime time with regionalized coverage of four games May 22, led by New York Yankees-New York Mets, and three on June 26, including Yankees-Los Angeles Dodgers. Depending on those ratings, Fox could have much more MLB prime-time action next season.

Fox Sports President Ed Goren says that while TV ratings drop in summertime, "what seems to still resonate is original programming" — which is also one way to look at baseball games. While Saturday is TV's least-watched night, Goren notes that every Fox NASCAR race aired Saturday in prime time won its night, as did a 20-inning Mets-St. Louis Cardinals game last month that stretched into prime time. "It was an anomaly, but when you see that you think maybe there's an opportunity."

Fox can only air a certain number of regular-season games — now 72 — but can decide how many games to air in any given TV window. MLB has the final say on game scheduling.

Goren suggests that expanding regionalized coverage in prime time to, say, seven simultaneously played games, up from the two or three Fox now airs in afternoons, could aggregate enough TV markets to produce a bigger rating. That strategy was used in the 1990s by the now-defunct Baseball Network on NBC and ABC, which sometimes regionalized more than a dozen simultaneous games on weekend nights. Says Goren: "You can't go back to the full Baseball Network model, but a form of it could be helpful for Fox and MLB."