Major League Baseball will start 2016 the same way it finished 2015, with Edinson Volquez and the Kansas City Royals facing Matt Harvey and the New York Mets in front of a national TV audience. A World Series rematch is ESPN’s first Sunday Night Baseball special of the new season, and on the regular season’s first night, no less.
Mets vs. Royals 2016 live stream: Time, TV schedule and how to watch World Series rematch online
A World Series rematch on ESPN.
Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports
The Mets and Royals are coming from a good place, of course, but neither has an easy road back to the Fall Classic.
Analytics have never much liked Ned Yost’s Royals teams, but FanGraphs’ playoff odds give them the lowest odds (5.8 percent) of any AL Central team to win that division this year. They lost trade deadline rentals pitcher Johnny Cueto and versatile slugger Ben Zobrist, and while both of them were really good, they “only” contributed about four wins above replacement level after coming over in trades. The Royals won the Central by 12 games.
The NL East is likely a two-horse race between the Mets and the Washington Nationals. The Mets don’t figure to be any worse than they were last year, still boasting the league’s deepest young stable of pitchers and not losing anything they can’t replace. (For instance, they lost all-bat, no-glove infielder Daniel Murphy in free agency and responded by trading for all-bat, no-glove infielder Neil Walker.) This is still a really good team, but the Mets shouldn’t bank on the Nationals flopping in another year of Bryce Harper’s prime.
However things work out, they start Sunday for both the Royals and Mets. Here’s where to find them:
New York Mets at Kansas City Royals, 8:37 p.m. ET
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