Club Benefits
Baseball is back, so let’s take a moment to appreciate the crack of the bat and the green grass. But is that the right shade of green?
I’ve spent about a third of my life testing and reviewing TVs, but I’ve spent all of my life being a baseball fan. Learning about TV picture quality for my day job has made me realize just how wonky most people’s TVs look during baseball broadcasts.
In honor of the 2026 Major League Baseball season, let’s put together a gameplan for your TV. Here are some basic steps you can take to improve your TV’s picture before we get too deep into the season.
Article continues below1. Disable Eco mode
If enabled, the bright, colorful sights of a Major League ballpark can end up appearing soft and flat.
Almost every TV comes with an energy-saving setting, and it’s usually enabled by default. You can read all about these settings in our Eco mode explainer, but here's the long and short of it: Energy-saving picture modes and settings dynamically adjust a TV's brightness in order to reduce energy consumption.
These features are managed by a built-in light sensor on the TV that adjusts the TV’s luminance level depending on ambient lighting conditions. Unfortunately, this typically results in a dulled, dim picture, as these functions are typically way too aggressive. As a result, the bright, colorful sights of a Major League ballpark can end up appearing soft and flat.
To disable these settings, you should first check your TV's settings menu for options like Power, Energy or Energy Saving. Some brands tuck this toggle in the TV's Brightness menu, while others relegate the setting to a more all-encompassing menu (like General Settings).
On some TVs, the primary energy-saving option is an entire picture mode. In this situation, I recommend using something other than the energy-saving picture mode. For baseball games, this doesn’t necessarily mean you should set your TV into Sports mode and forget about it.
2. Choose a better picture mode
It may seem counterintuitive to use anything other than your TV's dedicated Sports picture mode for baseball (or any sport), but I encourage you to give your TV's other picture modes a shot. In my long, TV-testing career, I've never seen a default Sports mode that was worth using.
Like both Vivid or Dynamic (two picture modes to avoid on every TV), Sports mode tends to crank up the color saturation, increase the sharpness and shift the white balance to something bluer and more unnatural looking. For baseball games, this can result in a neon green-colored field, garish uniforms and over-sharpened details.
If you decide you dig this look during MLB games, by all means, stick with it. But I recommend trying a more true-to-life picture mode first.
Look for modes like Cinema, Filmmaker, Movie or Theater, then make finer adjustments based on those starting points. These picture modes track reference accuracy closer than modes like Vivid and Sports, which means they allow your TV to more closely replicate the colors of everyday life. This is true for cheap TVs and premium TVs, so give it a shot.
3. Make sure you're using the right color temperature
As a lifelong Red Sox fan, the last thing I want to see are red socks that look more purple than red. Most TVs arrive with the proper color temperature set by default, but just in case, it's worth giving this setting a quick peek.
While some sports fans favor a cooler-looking picture, I recommend a warmer, more-natural look for baseball broadcasts. Most of the time, this is a matter of choosing Warm or Low from your TV's available color temperature presets.
Some TVs label color temperature options with a number, like Expert1, Warm2 or Warm1. This is the case with Sony, Samsung and Hisense TVs, for instance. Cycle through these options to see which looks best, then move onto your TV's backlight setting.
4. Increase the backlight for a punchier picture
If your eyes are comfortable with a brighter picture, there are few settings you can adjust that will have a bigger impact on picture quality. On most LED-based TVs (like QLEDs and Mini-LED TVs), this setting will be called Backlight. Depending on the type of LED TV, though, you should also check that Local Dimming is set to High and that any Peak Brightness settings are set to High, too.
OLED TVs don’t rely on LED-based backlights, so for these TVs, the luminance of the picture can be adjusted via the OLED Pixel Brightness and/or Peak Brightness setting. As the owner of an LG OLED, I keep my TV's Peak Brightness setting at High with OLED Pixel Brightness set to 95 during SDR baseball broadcasts.
When you watch a baseball game in HDR, your TV will automatically set some of these brightness options to their highest setting, so you might have fewer steps to tweak during HDR broadcasts.
5. Turn down (or turn off) motion smoothing
While I usually have a strict "no motion smoothing allowed" rule for movies and cinematic TV shows, baseball broadcasts are different. While filmic content is shot at 24fps, most baseball broadcasts come through at 60fps. This means that certain motion-enhancement settings might improve your viewing experience.
The key to making motion smoothing work for baseball games is to apply it with a light touch. Unfortunately, this flexibility comes down to make and model. Some TVs offer granular motion-enhancement settings (think sliders, not on/off toggles), which are better suited for getting your motion handling dialed-in to your liking.
The key to making motion smoothing work for baseball games is to apply it with a light touch.
On most of the newest Samsung TVs, for example, you’ll find separate settings for both Blur Reduction and Judder Reduction. Blur Reduction smooths out fast-moving objects by reducing the distracting smearing effect that often comes with them. For baseball, you might appreciate what this does for fastballs, rundowns and bang-bang plays to the plate.
Judder Reduction is less relevant for sports that are broadcast at 60fps, so I wouldn’t recommend using it for baseball games. I also wouldn't recommend using it for cinematic content shot at 24fps, but your mileage may vary, especially if your TV lets you control its intensity.
You can find similar de-blur and de-judder settings on Hisense TVs, LG OLEDs and most of TCL's recent TVs, too. Newer Sony TVs nest their motion settings within a menu called Motionflow, with fully customizable Smoothness and Clearness options available when Motionflow is set to Custom.
As a lifelong baseball fan, I want to close with a note about the human element. No, I'm not talking about the element of baseball that allows for an umpire to blow a critical call in extra innings — I'm talking about the human element of you picking the TV settings that look best to your eyes.
The steps I've outlined above are my recommendation, but you might find that different settings look better. It's up to you to call balls and strikes for your own living room.
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