Before 1990, the only national baseball telecasts aired on the networks, on Saturday afternoons and Monday nights, and there was no nightly program dedicated to the game. ESPN changed everything that season when it started airing baseball, bringing the majors much closer to any fan with cable.Years from now, we may look back at 2009 as another watershed year for televised baseball, raising our expectations of what we should see. MLB launched its own network on Jan. 1, bringing round-the-clock baseball coverage to more than 50 million subscribers on day one.