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 \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. You can do it with tunneling \u2014 the entire Cleveland Guardians pitching staff over the last decade. And you can do it with any sort of left-on-left splitter like Yuki Matsui. 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 \u201cThe pleasure I get from being able to say, \u2018Hey Adam, what did you see on that last swing?\u2019 or \u2018Hey [Anthony Rizzo], 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, 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","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":706735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[271908,92063,64,63,343775,343776,210871,591,103472,134417,85,75105],"class_list":["post-706734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-adam-ottavino","tag-anthony-rizzo","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-clayon-kershaw","tag-inside-the-pitch","tag-jason-benetti","tag-mlb","tag-mlb-on-nbc","tag-sam-flood","tag-sports","tag-sunday-night-baseball"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}