When NBC Sports executive producer Sam Flood learned in November that his network would be back doing baseball, he immediately knew who he wanted as his play-by-play voice and the format for it.
Viewers will get their first look and listen on Thursday when NBC has an opening day doubleheader.
The prime time game between the two-time defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks will be Jason Benetti’s debut as the network’s lead baseball announcer.
Benetti will be the voice of “Sunday Night Baseball,” which moves to NBC and Peacock after 26 seasons on ESPN. He handled play-by-play for the “MLB Sunday Leadoff” package on Peacock in 2022 after calling baseball for NBC during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
“Sam and I always joked after 2022 — and he was serious, and it turned out I was, too — that if NBC ever got baseball back in this sort of state, that I would be on the list of people that he would call. And I firmly appreciate that,” Benetti said.
Benetti had been with Fox Sports since 2022, calling baseball, NFL, college football and college basketball. Fox let him out of his contract early for this opportunity.
NBC will do the Sunday night games and Wild Card rounds the next three seasons after ESPN opted out of its original rights deal with MLB.
Benetti is a familiar voice for baseball fans, especially those in Detroit and Chicago. This will also be his third season calling Tigers games locally after eight seasons with the White Sox.
The format of “Sunday Night Baseball” will be the same as it was for “Sunday Leadoff.” Benetti will be joined in the booth by analysts from both teams. On Thursday night, it will be former Dodgers pitcher Orel Hershiser and Diamondbacks slugger Luis Gonzalez, who led the franchise to a World Series title in 2001.
For the first “Sunday Night Baseball” game between the Cleveland Guardians and Seattle Mariners, it will be Rick Manning and Ryan Rowland-Smith.
“At some point, somebody will ask if you’re around a bunch of baseball people, what three people would you want to have at the dinner table to talk baseball? And I kind of get to do that with this every week,” Benetti said. “It’s going to be two separate people who maybe you haven’t heard have a baseball conversation before. That brings me a lot of joy and curiosity, and we think it’s going to be for fans as well.”
Having analysts from both teams also harkens back to when NBC did the World Series. From 1947 through ’76, NBC would use either the play-by-play announcers or analysts for the Fall Classic.
In 1975, Carlton Fisk’s epic home run in the 12th inning of Game 6 was called on NBC by Red Sox announcer Dick Stockton, who would later become the lead NBA voice for CBS.
“The biggest complaint you hear during the postseason in baseball is, I can’t hear my people. I can’t hear my guys call the game. We’re going to have one person that’s authentic to that team calling games through the season,” Flood said, the executive producer of NBC Sports. “When we do the Wild Card round, it will exist as well. Because it’s the best way to know exactly what’s going on inside each clubhouse, on the field, who’s hot, who’s not, and what matters most to those fans.”
Benetti said he will enjoy the challenge of working with different analysts every week, and that working nine innings with two people each with their own cadence and tenor will be a fun puzzle to solve.
Benetti likened it in some ways to when he worked college basketball games on ESPN with the late Bill Walton. There was also a White Sox game in 2019 in Southern California against the Angels, where Walton was Benetti's analyst.
“When I worked with Bill — a marvelous, joyful human being — you just had to know that you’re going to have to pay attention to the game and then Bill and the conversation, whatever crosses your own synapses, and then weigh that at all times. And it’s this crossword puzzle that is not black and white; it’s like psychedelic squares instead, but you just kind of have to always gauge where your mind needs to go. And the answer usually is two or three places at once,” Benetti said. “Working with Bill in large part taught me that you can have a conversation about a lot of things while honoring the game and having a great time doing it.”
NBC will also introduce an “inside pitch” segment during games featuring analysis from either Clayton Kershaw or Adam Ottavino, who have signed on as studio analysts.
Flood said the aim is to do it once an inning or every other inning.
“The idea is to really take you through how Adam would approach pitching to Juan Soto or ‘The Password’ (the nickname for Jhostynxon Garcia). Whatever it is, he’s going to take you through that approach, during the at-bat, and looking at it through the lens of a pitcher who was on that mound in a recent season facing these same hitters,” Flood said.
NBC’s first game on Thursday features reigning NL Cy Young Award winner Paul Skenes and the Pittsburgh Pirates against Juan Soto and the New York Mets. Matt Vasgersian, the announcer for Sunday afternoon games on Peacock, will team up with Al Leiter and Neil Walker.
The first Sunday night game on NBC will be on April 12 when the Guardians visit the Atlanta Braves. The next six weeks will be on Peacock and NBCSN before NBC has Sunday night games from May 31 through Sept. 6.
NBC has a long history with baseball, albeit not much recently. The network carried games from 1939 through 1989. It was part of the short-lived Baseball Network with ABC in 1994 and ’95 and then aired playoff games from 1996 through 2000.
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