Padres Scheduled Doubleheaders (2027)

You can’t love baseball if you don’t love quirks. The MLB schedule includes something of a quirk in 2027: a handful of doubleheaders that are scheduled on purpose, months in advance, rather than the more familiar kind that gets forced on teams by a rainout. The Padres are part of two of them next season.

The Padres’ Two Scheduled Doubleheaders

• Tuesday, June 22, 2027 — vs. Chicago Cubs at Petco Park
• Saturday, July 10, 2027 — at Colorado Rockies, Coors Field

Each doubleheader consists of two regular nine-inning games at the same ballpark on the same day. The seven-inning doubleheaders used during the pandemic were a temporary rule; MLB returned to nine-inning games for doubleheaders beginning in 2022.

What “Scheduled” Actually Means

Most doubleheaders are born out of necessity: a game gets rained out, postponed or otherwise can’t be played as scheduled, and the teams eventually make it up by playing twice on another day.

These two are different. MLB put them on the calendar before the season even begins, so both teams know from the start that they’ll be playing twice that day.

Scheduled doubleheaders have become useful again as MLB works to fit a full 162-game schedule into a calendar that also requires every team to travel and play every other team during the season.

Format & Roster Rules

Single-admission vs. split-admission: Some scheduled doubleheaders let you into the ballpark for both games on one ticket; others clear the stadium after Game 1 and require a separate ticket for Game 2. The Padres haven’t announced which format applies to either of these two dates yet — that level of detail typically comes closer to the season, alongside game times.

The 27th man: MLB allows teams to add a 27th player to the active roster for a doubleheader, giving managers an extra player to work with over two games in one day. Both Padres doubleheaders fall within the part of the season when this rule applies, so the Padres should be eligible to carry an extra player on both dates.

Has This Happened Before?

Absolutely. Scheduled doubleheaders were once a routine part of baseball. They became much less common over the years, but MLB’s current schedule has brought them back on occasion.

The change to a balanced schedule in 2023 — when every team began playing all 29 other clubs every season — created some unusual scheduling challenges. A scheduled doubleheader can be one way to fit an interleague or cross-country series into the calendar without adding another day to an already crowded schedule.

So while two planned doubleheaders in one season isn’t exactly an everyday occurrence, it’s not unprecedented either. For Padres fans, the more interesting question is probably the practical one: Do you get to watch two games for the price of one?