If you’re tired of the old formulaic, mundane baseball broadcast, you’re in luck. For the second straight year, MLB Network will air what it calls an alternative broadcast “presented by MLB Now” on Wednesday at 3:30 eastern when Pittsburgh visits San Francisco.
Airing from its New Jersey studio, an MLB Now studio panel of Brian Kenny, John Smoltz, Jonah Keri, and MLB.com’s Mike Petriello will provide a mix of talk-show discussion, live play-by-play, in-game interviews and advanced information from MLB’s Statcast technology.
“There’s more than one way to call a ballgame, and there are very few attempts to try to alter that format,” Kenny told Awful Announcing in a phone interview. “And I know there’s reasons why the format has endured, but I think there are other ways to look at it and there are other ways to digest baseball.”
The alternative broadcast will be aired live on MLB Network, except in the local game markets, and will be available for authenticated live streaming and online at MLBNetwork.com, through participating TV providers, according to a network spokesman. The game won’t be available on its MLB.TV service.
“Even when you have a fantastic broadcast team, it’s still the same rhythm, it’s still the same cadence,” Kenny said. “I think there are reasons why we lapse into that. We’re basically parroting what’s been done the past 70, 80 years.”
For one day, in one broadcast, MLB Network will try to provide a departure from this century-old method. Similar to its MLB Tonight show, where it has live look-ins on games with interspersed panel commentary, Kenny hopes the telecast can still be fully dedicated to what’s on the field “but give a much richer analysis of the game while we’re doing it.”
With Kenny, who calls himself sabermetrically inclined, and analytic writers like Keri and Petriello as part of the alt-cast, Kenny says that the panel alone separates what the show will try to do from a normally called game and “coincides with where we’re at as baseball fans.”
“Having that brings us a different perspective,” Kenny said. “You’re obviously going to see the game through our own prism, through our own lens. And when you do that, I don’t think we have to tell you that this is sabermetric.”
After having Kevin Millar as the lead analyst for last year’s alternative broadcast, MLB is providing a big boost in name recognition with Smoltz, its new lead national color commentator on Fox. Smoltz is a rotating panelist on MLB Now, and Kenny says that the Hall of Famer likes the show’s unique train of thought.
“One of John’s strengths is that he really does try to back up and see the game, as they say, from 20,000 feet,” Kenny said. “He’s more inquisitive than most, and he likes to see the broader themes of baseball, which is something we frequently do on the show.”
In discussions with producers about the game, Kenny said that the group is going to try to focus more on game strategy, tactics and use of personnel.
If it’s the 4th or 5th inning, “what’s the trade-off in letting your pitcher hit in terms of win probability? Who’s in the bullpen? What’s the exchange?” How many more outs do you expect to get out of this pitcher, and what’s the benefit of having a pinch hitter come in?” Kenny asked. “So I want to be up on run expectancy, win probability.”
A kind of discussion like that is not something you’ll see on a regular telecast in the dog days of August, when a team’s broadcaster is calling the 120th game of the season. Kenny said that the alternative broadcast will try to emphasize— as long as it’s not a 16-1 blowout— things that normal broadcasting crews would take for granted and rarely, if ever, question.
“All that is being a little more critical about the questions and not just agreeing and saying ‘well, Bruce Bochy must know what he’s doing,’” Kenny said. “Let’s look at it from roster deployment, personnel deployment. Which really springs from the sabermetric school, economic way of thinking about the game.”
With shorter attention spans among viewers and a second screen experience becoming far more prevalent, Kenny was asked if an alternative broadcast format was the future of Major League Baseball on television.
“I’m not sure. There are some times where I just like a traditional play-by-play, nice and easy, and there’s other times where I want a tremendous amount of information,” Kenny said. “I wonder if 20, 30 years from now we will see a different format. And can we develop a more talk show format that is still paying attention to the game? I think that’s possible. I think it might be the best way, I’m not sure. But I know that’s what we’re going to try for.”
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