After nineteen years of stability, ESPN is now making its seventh change to Sunday Night Baseball in eight years.
ESPN announced Wednesday that it has replaced the Sunday Night Baseball analyst team of John Kruk and Curt Schilling with Jessica Mendoza and Aaron Boone. Kruk, who joined the SNB team in 2013, is headed back to the studio. Schilling, who joined the following year, will shift to Monday night games.
Mendoza made her debut as an ESPN MLB analyst last August, while Boone has worked on Monday Night Baseball in recent years.
The moves mark the seventh time since 2008 that Sunday Night Baseball has made a change to its broadcast team. From 1990-08, the broadcast featured Jon Miller and Joe Morgan in a two-person booth. Steve Phillips joined Miller and Morgan in 2009 but was replaced by Orel Hershiser in 2010 after a much-publicized scandal. Miller and Morgan were dumped the following year, due largely to viewer gripes about the latter, and were replaced by Shulman and Bobby Valentine. Valentine left for the Red Sox in 2012, with the man he replaced — Terry Francona — filling the vacancy in the booth. Francona left after one year to join the Indians and was replaced by Kruk, and the following year Hershiser left to call Dodgers games and was replaced by Schilling. Schilling got himself suspended last season for controversial comments, with Mendoza filling in. Kruk’s demotion in favor of Boone would seem to fall under the ‘change for the sake of change’ category.
While change is nothing new in sports television, there are few parallels to the virtually constant turnover on Sunday Night Baseball. Even the NBA on ESPN/ABC, once a model of instability, has now been headlined by Mike Breen, Jeff Van Gundy and/or Mark Jackson for ten straight seasons.
With that said, ESPN is not the only MLB broadcaster who has shaken things up in recent years. FOX is set to debut its third different lead broadcast team in four seasons, going from Joe Buck and Tim McCarver in 2013 to Buck with Harold Reynolds and Tom Verducci the past two seasons, to Buck and John Smoltz this year.
(Wed. news from ESPN Media Zone)
