{"id":660817,"date":"2026-04-03T13:48:16","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T13:48:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/660817\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T13:48:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T13:48:16","slug":"this-week-in-baseball-returns-but-original-show-still-casts-large-shadow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/660817\/","title":{"rendered":"This Week in Baseball returns, but original show still casts large shadow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Major League Baseball caught baseball fans by surprise earlier this week by announcing the return of This Week in Baseball<\/a>. But for some of us, the weekly highlights series never really left.<\/p>\n

Old episodes of the original series, which ran in its original format from 1977 to 1998, are everywhere on the internet. Apple TV lets you stream a few dozen episodes ever since the streaming service signed on to carry weekly baseball games a few years ago. And a simple search on YouTube reveals many more episodes, including some uploaded to the MLB Vault channel<\/a> that\u2019s affiliated with Major League Baseball.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a nice nostalgia trip for baseball fans of a certain age \u2014 or even Gen Zers intrigued by a glimpse at the baseball of the late 1970s and 1980s. When I\u2019ve got a spare moment, I find myself rewatching those old episodes, which have not only given me the chance to relive some of the memorable moments of my youth but also an appreciation for This Week in Baseball and its impact on fans from my generation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis Week in Baseball was so novel,\u201d agreed Stephen Borelli, editor of USA Today Sports Weekly, who, like me, grew up watching the original show. \u201cAnd obviously things from childhood tend to stay with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Look here, y\u2019all!<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the return of \u2026 This Week in Baseball \u26be\ufe0f pic.twitter.com\/Bfx3UYgavQ<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 MLB (@MLB) April 1, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

With the revamped This Week in Baseball set to debut today (April 3) on X (formerly known as Twitter), it\u2019s unclear what exactly format the new show will take. Expect a shorter format geared toward social media platforms, with Major League Baseball promising a return to many elements of the original, such as player profiles, game highlights, and \u2014 of course \u2014 the signature bloopers.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll see if this new format finds an audience once This Week in Baseball debuts. But to fans of the original version, the revived show has a lot to live up to.<\/p>\n

The Early Days of TWIB<\/p>\n

No matter what happens with the new version of This Week in Baseball \u2014 or TWIB, as it\u2019s known by fans \u2014 it will reach the airwaves with a lot less scrambling than the original version. As Geoff Belinfante, a producer on the original series, told me, \u201cWe were doing something nobody had done before.\u201d<\/p>\n

True, NFL Films produced a weekly highlight show at the time \u2014 something Major League Baseball was looking to replicate when it commissioned This Week in Baseball. But as Belinfante noted, there were only 14 NFL games a week at that time, with most of the action taking place on a single day. That allowed NFL Films to dispatch film crews to each game to capture footage. With more than 70 baseball games a week, TWIB\u2019s producers wouldn\u2019t have the same luxury.<\/p>\n

The solution came in the form of a relatively new Sony innovation \u2014 3\/4-inch videotape, which allowed for greater portability. The\u00a0production team ended up installing 3\/4-inch tape recorders in each Major League stadium to capture footage from each game. The tapes would then be shipped via air courier to the show\u2019s production offices in New York, where loggers recorded time codes for the key highlights. Editors would piece together the selections, writers would punch out a script, with narration and music added to the final version. Every week in those early days, the finished tape would then be sent out to various stations for broadcast over the weekend.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s quite amazing we were able to get anything on the air, but it worked,\u201d Belinfate said.<\/p>\n

Even so, the show\u2019s producers needed time to work out any kinks in what was a fairly complex system. The early weeks of the 1977 season were used as dry runs, before This Week in Baseball officially hit the airwaves in June.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

How TWIB stood out<\/p>\n

That approach of extensively capturing and curating live game action paid off immediately. \u201c\u200b\u200bIn the pilot that we did, there were some things that happened that I had never seen before, a couple of things that I\u2019ve never even seen since,\u201d Belinfante said.<\/p>\n

Specifically, in highlights from a Cubs-Expos game<\/a>, Bobby Murcer of Chicago rounded third and dashed for home, running through the stop sign that third base coach Peanuts Lowery had thrown up. So Lowery took matters into his own hands quite literally, grabbing Murcer on his way to the plate. The interference call appeared on This Week in Baseball, punctuated with some light-hearted music, and so the baseball blooper was born.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou wouldn\u2019t see a lot of this stuff,\u201d Borelli, the USAToday editor, told me. \u201cYou certainly wouldn\u2019t see bloopers. This Week in Baseball essentially invented the blooper.\u201d<\/p>\n

While bloopers remained a part of the show \u2014 and eventually found their way to video scoreboards in baseball parks around the country \u2014 they weren\u2019t the only part of TWIB\u2019s appeal. A typical episode would highlight each division leader and the teams chasing them. There might be a feature segment, like an early episode in that 1977 season, highlighting the Toronto Blue Jays\u2019 inaugural campaign. And, of course, to counterbalance those bloopers, TWIB also included highlight reels of fantastic plays, a forerunner of the Top Plays segment that\u2019s now a mainstay of ESPN\u2019s SportsCenter long after TWIB went off the air.<\/p>\n

Those highlights \u2014 whether stellar plays, bloopers or anything in between \u2014 help explain a lot of the appeal of the show to its original audience. During the show\u2019s heyday, you could watch your local team on TV and see a Game of the Week broadcast on Saturdays. Summertime might bring a Monday Night Baseball game on ABC, but before the days when cable TV became more widespread, that\u2019s where your options for watching baseball began and ended.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is before satellite, before ESPN,\u201d Belinfante said. \u201cSo there was really no way that anybody could see highlights from anything other than their hometown teams. So This Week in Baseball went on the air in June of \u201877, it was like a revelation, because all of a sudden, baseball fans could see what was going on in games around the league that they could only read about in their local newspapers and their little box scores.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mel Allen and Music<\/p>\n

This Week in Baseball had a few other ways to appeal to audiences, and one of them involved the vocal stylings of the man tasked with narrating all those clips.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout Mel Allen, there\u2019s no This Week in Baseball,\u201d said Borelli, who wrote a biography of the long-time baseball announcer called How About That.<\/p>\n

Allen had been the New York Yankees\u2019 radio play-by-play announcer during the team\u2019s glory years of the 1940s through the 1960s. Making him a part of the show gave TWIB \u201clegitimacy,\u201d Borelli says, connecting it to a familiar voice for the adults who tuned in.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe made it sound like he was live at the ballpark doing this, but it was all scripted,\u201d Borelli said of Allen\u2019s narration.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

But while Allen\u2019s \u201cHow about that?\u201d catchphrase may have come to be associated with This Week in Baseball in the minds of younger viewers, the show had developed other familiar sounds in the form of its intro and outro music. Even if you were just a casual TWIB viewer, you probably can hear the peppy intro song that started each show (accompanied by Allen telling you what was in store for that episode) or the soaring orchestrations of the music that ran over the opening credits.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

As it turns out, neither song \u2014 the opening \u201cJet Set\u201d<\/a> number or \u201cGathering Crowds\u201d<\/a> that closed out each episode \u2014 was written specifically for This Week in Baseball. Both were selections of stock music that Belinfante helped pick out during a typically late night, getting the show ready for its premiere.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I did anything right in my career, I guess I did that, because people still call me to this day and want to know where they can find [the music],\u201d Belinfante said.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the soundtrack certainly made an impression on viewers like Borelli back in the day. \u201c[\u2018Gathering Crowds\u2019] used to go through my head when I\u00a0 played whiffle ball with my friends,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

TWIB\u2019s Impact: Now and Then<\/p>\n

All that helps explain the show\u2019s appeal back when it first aired. But why have I found such comfort in watching it all these years later? After all, when I stream a TWIB episode from the business end of the 1989 divisional races, it\u2019s not like I don\u2019t know which teams are going to wind up in the postseason that year.<\/p>\n

Part of it goes back to what Borelli said \u2014 the things from our childhood tend to stick with us, and that\u2019s true of This Week in Baseball, which was very much appointment viewing for me back in the early 1980s. It\u2019s fun to see players I grew up watching like Dale Murphy, Mike Schmidt, and Rickey Henderson still in their prime, with their feats taking place on a big-screen TV instead of in my mind\u2019s eye. It\u2019s also a blast to see footage of old stadiums and uniforms, though I\u2019d suggest averting your eyes any time footage from a Chicago White Sox game of the 1970s appears in an episode.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve come to think of rewatching old episodes as a sort of televised version of Let\u2019s Remember Some Guys<\/a>, the phrase coined by Defector\u2019s David Roth for when anyone with a little age on the odometer starts reminiscing about former players. Just fire up an old episode of This Week in Baseball, and your TV will start serving up plenty of guys to be remembered over the next half-hour.<\/p>\n

But the fact that I can still happily fall down a TWIB rabbit hole is a testament to what a great job the team behind the original series did cobbling together those episodes under deadline. \u201cWe tried to be creative. We tried to do something a little bit different,\u201d Belinfante told me. \u201dAnd judging by the fact that you still remember the show fondly, and there are others out there, I hope that we succeeded.\u201d<\/p>\n

Belinfante and I spoke a few weeks before Major League Baseball\u2019s announcement of a reboot dropped. But even then, both of us agreed there\u2019s still a place for a show in that same spirit as the original. \u201cI think there is a need for people to be able to bring themselves up to date on what\u2019s going on in baseball in a half hour,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Borelli wasn\u2019t as sure when I spoke to him before this week\u2019s announcement, at least when I asked whether a rebooted TWIB would have the same impact as the one he and I both love. \u201cI think it was just the right time and right place for the original show,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

But after Major League Baseball revealed plans to revive This Week in Baseball on social media, I sent Borelli a follow-up email asking what he thought about the news, and he was certainly encouraged by the return of the original theme music. \u201cIt gives them a chance to connect it with a new generation of fans with something familiar to their parents, much like the show did with Mel Allen in 1977,\u201d Borelli said.<\/p>\n

The move to social media could be just what a new version of TWIB needs to find an audience, Borelli added, though matching what the original pulled off will be harder than some of the defensive plays the old show used to highlight.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe old show came at a perfect time because highlights weren\u2019t readily available, and it broke new ground. There was never a format like it,\u201d Borelli said. \u201cHighlights are plentiful, so I don\u2019t think it will be able to match the resonance of the old show. It will have to rely on something else \u2014 like the personality of the host or a new feature of the show other than just providing highlights \u2014 to be successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

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