The Major League Baseball TV hot stove is starting to warm up.
Baltimore Orioles play-by-play voice Kevin Brown and former Dodgers P Clayton Kershaw are potential candidates to join incoming MLB rights partner NBCUniversal, Andrew Marchand of The Athletic reported Tuesday. That news comes within hours of a report by Ryan Glasspiegel of Front Office Sports that Fox Sports’ Jason Benetti has emerged as the “leading candidate” for NBC’s lead play-by-play position.
While Front Office Sports referred to Benetti as the “leading candidate” for NBC, Marchand referred to him only as “a possibility.”
Of course, Brown and Benetti may not be an either/or scenario. NBC acquired two weekly MLB packages as part of its rights deal last year, the “Sunday Night Baseball” package that ESPN opted out of last February and the “Sunday Leadoff” window that originally aired on Peacock but more recently belonged to Roku. Unlike ESPN, which generally aired only one MLB game per week, NBC will necessarily need to have a dedicated “B” team throughout the regular season.
With Major League Baseball having been locked into long-term deals with FOX, ESPN and TNT Sports for more than a decade, there have been a number of acclaimed local play-by-play voices who have largely been shut out of regular weekly and postseason roles on national TV. The addition of NBCUniversal — and to a far lesser extent Netflix, which is set to air a handful of events — offers a rare opportunity for some of these voices to take on the prominent national roles that have thus far eluded them.
As for Kershaw, Marchand described the recently-retired star is a “top studio target” for NBCU. NBC Sports president Rick Cordella previously told sports media reporter Richard Deitsch late last year that the company plans to launch a regular, on-site studio show adjacent to its Sunday night games. Marchand floated the possibility of Kershaw working “a game or two” in the booth.
The last time NBC held MLB rights — during Peacock’s tenure as home of “MLB Sunday Leadoff” in the 2022 and 2023 seasons — the company did not hire a regular analyst, instead relying on local analysts from the participating clubs. Marchand reported Tuesday that NBCU “may” resume that arrangement in its new deal, though it is somewhat hard to believe that the network would not opt for a regular analyst.
