Prior to 2017, ESPN’s top baseball studio show, Baseball Tonight, was aired nightly throughout the season to show baseball fans some of the most important action each night in the MLB. But now, the show solely acts as a pregame show for the network’s live MLB broadcasts, such as Sunday Night Baseball, which old Baseball Tonight host Karl Ravech is somewhat upset about.
Last month, Ravech responded to a post on X about the old Baseball Tonight format with a caption reading ‘Remember when Baseball Tonight aired every single night and it was just an hour of highlights and we were a proper society?’
In response to this post, Ravech promptly said that he remembers the format “like it was yesterday”.
Like it was yesterday https://t.co/xIDkFsz1at
— Karl Ravech (@karlravechespn) June 30, 2024
Ravech, who now holds several key roles at ESPN regarding the network’s baseball coverage, including being the play-by-play voice of Sunday Night Baseball, explained his reasoning for this tweet in a recent conversation with Chad Finn of The Boston Globe.
“I’ll be honest,” said Ravech, “That tweet was obviously a reaction to the program, which I know they loved. And I understand that with the people that were on it, with Peter [Gammons] and Harold [Reynolds] and [John Kruk] and [Bobby] Valentine. There was no other place to get something like that.
“But it felt almost as much about the difference in the temperature of the country and the world back then that people were also longing for, as opposed to the climate we all live in today and the animosity that’s everywhere. It was about both things. I’m grateful people remember it fondly, and I’m saddened by it, too, that none of it exists in that way anymore.”
There was truly a time when ESPN was the worldwide leader in baseball coverage, thanks to Baseball Tonight. We at Awful Announcing even listed Baseball Tonight as a top-10 ESPN show in the history of the network.
Outside of Sunday Night Baseball, the network’s baseball coverage is certainly lacking a bit. Given Ravech’s background as the longtime host of Baseball Tonight, it’s fairly understandable that he is somewhat saddened by how much things have changed over the years.
About Reice Shipley
Reice Shipley is a staff writer for Comeback Media that graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in Sports Media. He previously worked at Barrett Sports Media and is a fan of all things Syracuse sports.