For Dodgers fans, Clayton Kershaw’s final start comes with a catch.
Kershaw announced his retirement on Thursday, ending an 18-year career entirely spent in Dodger blue. The three-time Cy Young winner and 2014 NL MVP will make his final regular-season start Friday night at Dodger Stadium against the San Francisco Giants. It’s a perfect scenario.
There’s just one potential problem: the game is an Apple TV+ exclusive.
Making history under the lights at Dodger Stadium.
Clayton Kershaw faces the @SFGiants in one of his final regular season starts with the @Dodgers, tonight on #FridayNightBaseball. pic.twitter.com/HbeuihFLx0
— Apple TV (@AppleTV) September 19, 2025
According to reports, Friday’s contest will not be simulcast on SportsNet LA, despite the historic nature of Kershaw’s farewell. This leaves Dodgers fans with limited options to watch one of their franchise’s greatest players take the mound for the final time at home.
The situation feels particularly frustrating given the precedent MLB set just last year. When the Dodgers faced the Yankees on a Friday night, the league allowed the Apple TV+ exclusive to be simulcast on both SportsNet LA and YES Network. However, according to Dodger Blue, SportsNet LA has indicated that, despite the game’s significance, no similar arrangement is in place.
Apple TV+ does offer one consolation for local fans, which is the ability to sync Friday’s broadcast with the Dodgers radio. That means viewers can at least listen to the home broadcast team that ranked No. 12 in Awful Announcing’s 2025 local radio announcer rankings. And if SportsNet LA was able to simulcast, Joe Davis might have had other duties, since he’ll be calling Rams-Eagles in Philadelphia on the other side of the country this Sunday.
This streaming exclusivity frustration isn’t isolated to Los Angeles. Tonight’s doubleheader makes the situation even more complicated, as Toronto Blue Jays fans faced a similar predicament earlier this week when their team’s potential playoff-clinching game was locked behind an Apple TV+ paywall.
In that case, Sportsnet was able to negotiate broadcast rights after significant backlash. The Blue Jays’ situation was particularly egregious, given Sportsnet’s coast-to-coast coverage in Canada and recent game audiences of well over seven figures.
Apple TV+ holds exclusive rights to Friday’s game as part of its Friday Night Baseball package, which guarantees the tech giant a minimum of four exclusive broadcasts per season for whatever teams they choose to air. Apple has maintained these rights since 2022 through a multiyear agreement with MLB, and Friday’s Dodgers-Giants matchup fell within their selection parameters.
It just so happens that Kershaw’s retirement announcement came at the worst possible time for said parameters.
“I’m going to call it, I’m going to retire,” Kershaw said during Thursday’s press conference. “I’m at peace with it. I think it’s the right time.”
It’s symptomatic of a broader issue plaguing baseball fans as streaming services gobble up exclusive game inventory. Nobody cares much when a random Friday in July gets the Apple TV+ treatment, but September games with genuine stakes? That’s when fans rightfully lose their minds over having meaningful moments called by broadcast crews without the institutional knowledge of their local voices.
That’s not meant to be a slight at the folks at Apple TV+, who do a tremendous job. If anything, it’s a structural problem with how exclusive streaming rights intersect with the most meaningful moments in a team’s season. We’ve written about it before, and we’ll probably write about it again.
Friday’s contest carries playoff implications for both teams, making Kershaw’s farewell just one of many storylines. MLB’s partnership with Apple TV+ serves both parties. It creates audiences for Apple and generates fresh revenue streams for baseball. However, it’s an unfortunate coincidence that such a meaningful moment for Dodgers fans coincides with a night when they can’t access their familiar local voices.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.