As expected, NBC Sports has named Jason Benetti as its lead Major League Baseball voice.
NBC Sports officially announced Wednesday that it has hired Benetti the voice of its “Sunday Night Baseball” package that begins later this month. He will debut on the network’s primetime Diamondbacks-Dodgers game on Opening Day March 26.
Benetti joins a list of lead NBC baseball voices that includes Bob Costas, Vin Scully, Curt Gowdy and himself. He was previously the lead voice of the “MLB Sunday Leadoff” package on Peacock in the 2022 season, leaving that role when he joined Fox Sports later that year. His Fox contract was not set to expire until later this year, but evidently NBC and Fox were able to work out an arrangement allowing him to make the move.
With Fox, Benetti was behind Joe Davis and Adam Amin on the MLB depth chart, meaning that he did not get to work any MLB Postseason games. His highest-profile role on Fox was on the network’s college football games, where he was on the “B” team behind Gus Johnson.
Wednesday’s announcement did not include any mention of additional roles Benetti might take for NBC, but the network has a variety of properties that he as contributed to in the past — including college football and the NBA.
Notably, NBC will not hire a dedicated game analyst for its new package. Instead, Benetti will be paired with analysts who have “connections to each participating team.” That was the approach that NBCU — and later Roku — used for the “MLB Sunday Leadoff” package. While rare in modern sports broadcasting, it was not unusual in the early days of baseball on television for national broadcasts to utilize local announcers.
NBC will need at least one other play-by-play voice on its MLB roster, as it will often carry two games on each day it airs games — “MLB Sunday Leadoff” on Peacock and then “Sunday Night Baseball” on NBC and Peacock. That includes Opening Day, which begins with a Pirates-Mets matinee. The network was said to be pursuing Orioles voice Kevin Brown, according to a report in January by Andrew Marchand of The Athletic.
Benetti becomes the fifth play-by-play voice in the history of “Sunday Night Baseball,” which previously aired on ESPN — joining Jon Miller, Dan Shulman, Matt Vasgersian and Karl Ravech.
