Two months into NBC\u2019s Sunday Night Baseball experiment, Jason Benetti knows exactly what separates it from every baseball broadcast that came before it.<\/p>\n
The \u201cInside the Pitch\u201d concept \u2014 NBC executive producer Sam Flood\u2019s live at-bat breakdown feature<\/a> that debuted Opening Day alongside former pitchers Adam Ottavino<\/a> and Clayton Kershaw<\/a> \u2014 has drawn acclaim since the network\u2019s first Sunday night broadcast in late March. But in an appearance on The Athletic\u2019s Starkville podcast with Jayson Stark and Doug Glanville<\/a> this week, Benetti made the most compelling case yet for why \u201cInside the Pitch\u201d has changed what Sunday Night Baseball looks and sounds like.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n \u201cIt wasn\u2019t my idea, but I\u2019m really glad they\u2019ve parachuted me into it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The reason it works, in Benetti\u2019s telling, is that it takes the broadcast down to the level at which baseball is actually played. The pitcher-hitter confrontation has always been the sport\u2019s intellectual and competitive core, but MLB broadcasts have historically treated it as scenery rather than subject matter.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know that so much of the game is decided between batter and pitcher,\u201d Benetti said. \u201cMost of this is all alchemy, as Adam Ottavino called it a couple of weeks ago \u2014 about deciding how to confound hitters. For pitchers, that is the whole idea. And you can do it with force \u2014 \u2018The Miz,\u2019 Jacob Misiorowski<\/a>. You can do it with tunneling \u2014 the entire Cleveland Guardians<\/a> pitching staff over the last decade. And you can do it with any sort of left-on-left splitter like Yuki Matsui<\/a>. You can try to addle all hitters and put their brains in a blender, but we have somebody down there whose job it is to tell us what\u2019s going on with that last pitch. That level of granular detail makes baseball an undeniable joy.\u201d<\/p>\n What \u201cInside the Pitch\u201d affords Benetti that no previous broadcast format has is the ability to redirect the conversation mid-at-bat to someone who has lived the experience from sixty feet, six inches away.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n \u201cThe pleasure I get from being able to say, \u2018Hey Adam, what did you see on that last swing?\u2019 or \u2018Hey [Anthony Rizzo<\/a>], if you\u2019re 3-2 here and he\u2019s got four pitches, what are you prioritizing \u2014 location, pitch type, whatever\u2026\u2019 That\u2019s how the game\u2019s played, and I love that, and I appreciate the chance to do it honestly.\u201d<\/p>\n Awful Announcing reviewed NBC\u2019s debut broadcast here in March<\/a> and found Ottavino particularly strong in the role, walking audiences through arm angles, pitch mix, and pitcher mindsets during what was otherwise an unremarkable game between Cleveland and Seattle<\/a>, and noting that the concept makes brilliant use of the umpire cam, an innovation that had been in place for years without ever serving a real purpose until NBC built Inside the Pitch around it. Like \u201cOn the Bench<\/a>\u201d on NBA telecasts and \u201cInside the Glass\u201d on NHL coverage, \u201cInside the Pitch\u201d offers a ground-level perspective unavailable anywhere else, though where those concepts put viewers physically closer to the action, this one puts them inside the decision-making itself.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I believe is we\u2019re taking the game to the level that it\u2019s played at in talking about those split-second decisions,\u201d Benetti said. \u201cAnd if there\u2019s anything most innovative about what Sam Flood, and Rick Cordella, and everybody at NBC have decided to do, it\u2019s that.\u201d<\/p>\n The post Jason Benetti explains why NBC\u2019s \u2018Inside the Pitch\u2019 is unlike anything MLB broadcasting has done before<\/a> appeared first on Awful Announcing<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two months into NBC\u2019s Sunday Night Baseball experiment, Jason Benetti knows exactly what separates it from every baseball…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":713749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[8651,3882,5,1147,51,11714,8580,30376,4,3625,74026,619,13133,7941],"class_list":["post-713748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-adam-ottavino","tag-anthony-rizzo","tag-baseball","tag-clayton-kershaw","tag-cleveland-guardians","tag-jacob-misiorowski","tag-jason-benetti","tag-jayson-stark","tag-mlb","tag-nbc-sports","tag-sam-flood","tag-seattle","tag-sunday-night-baseball","tag-yuki-matsui"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116670050210450664","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}