Four Questions for Year Four of Major League Cricket

The fourth season of Major League Cricket is upon us. The league will once again feature a ten-game schedule per team and play will move, en masse, from venue to venue over the course of the tournament. This year's newest venue is the LA Knight Riders' new home digs in Pomona -- the same pitch that will be used for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. There will be no games played in either Lauderhill, Florida or Morrisville, North Carolina this year, meaning Dallas is about as far east as the league will travel in 2026.

And, as the league embarks on its fourth installment, four burning questions need to be asked.

Do American sports fans have the bandwidth to follow two non-traditional international sports this summer?

Cricket has been vying for the eyeballs of America's traditional baseball/football/basketball-watching sports fan for years. The league has expanded from five games per team a season in its inaugural year to the ten-game season it ran last year and will run again this year. Attendance has also been consistent over the league's first three years.

This year, however, the competition for viewers isn't limited to baseball and the off-season moves of the NFL and NBA. With the FIFA World Cup in the States this summer, those looking to experience a new sport may be swayed more by the lure of seeing the world's biggest sport on its largest stage than by the world's second or third biggest sport on a decidedly smaller stage.

The World Cup has already affected MLC in some not-so-small ways. Travel to Texas to see matches at Grand Prairie Stadium has become a lot more expensive in previous years thanks to soccer matches in Dallas. There's less of a financial impact from WC matches being played at the same time as MLC matches in the Bay Area or Los Angeles, but those travel destinations are already among the priciest in the country.

Whether adventurous sports fans will try to track down the Seattle Orcas versus the Washington Freedom or opt for Brazil versus Haiti this Friday night has yet to be seen.

Will games aired on regional sports networks move the needle at all?

Yes, it's great that the league is entering its fourth year, but the majority of the games are still being streamed on a cricket-specific service. This pretty much means that the only way anyone is going to know about the league is if they're already cricket fans. Not the greatest scenario for growing the game in this country. Thankfully, some regional sports networks have stepped up again and will help newcomers find the sport.

In the NY area, MI New York games will be aired on the YES Network -- the same place New York Yankees games are aired. And in both the Seattle area and the Bay Area, regional stations will also carry games for those who don't subscribe to Willow. This will give the game and the league some amazing exposure in some of the biggest sports markets in the US.

Will this be the year that the Los Angeles Knight Riders finally make their move?

Living in Boston, I've been conditioned to dislike teams from LA (and, of course, New York). That said, from the league's inception, I've been rooting for the LA Knight Riders. They have all my favorite players -- Sunil Narine and Andre Russell from the West Indies, former India U19 World Cup captain Unmukt Chand, and the USA's Ali Khan among others.

On paper, they shouldn't be as bad as they've been. But they've been bad. Really bad. Over three seasons, they've amassed a 5-16-1 record. They've been over .500 for a total of 48 hours in three years; they won their opener in 2024 over TSK, but two days later dropped back to 1-1 with a loss to San Francisco. Hopefully, playing on a dedicated home pitch in Pomona will finally help them finally achieve some sort of respectability.