This year’s MLB Spring Training has an interesting new event in Spring Breakout. Growing out of the annual All-Star Futures Game and its popularity, this new four-day event from March 14-17 will see 16 games where each MLB team only plays their top prospects.
Each team will play once during this span, except the Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals (each set for two games thanks to the uneven numbers of clubs in Arizona and Florida for Spring Training). And as announced last week, MLB Network will televise six of those games.
AA can report exclusively that the Miami Marlins’ game against the Cardinals on Friday March 15 (2 p.m. ET) will be an in-house MLBN production, with Greg Amsinger calling the game alongside analysts Mark DeRosa and Jonathan Mayo. Amsinger, a St. Louis native who has been with MLBN since the network’s 2009 launch, often hosting late-night MLB Tonight and special event coverage, told AA via email he’s particularly excited for this opportunity:
“We get to do a lot of cool assignments, but I can’t begin to tell you how pumped I am for this one. Spring Breakout is one of the more meaningful initiatives baseball has created, so it’s only fitting that we deliver a quality MLB Network-produced telecast for fans everywhere. It will be a weekend of celebrating the game’s future, and we’ll be right in the thick of things breaking it all down.”
DeRosa, who played in MLB for 16 seasons (including with the Cardinals in 2009) and has co-hosted MLBN’s MLB Central morning show since 2015, told AA via email he thinks this prospect-focused telecast will be perfect for the growing numbers of fans interested in the game’s next stars.
“Fans today crave this information. Which prospect is on the rise, who might surprise, and all that good stuff. Putting some of these up-and-coming young players on display for a few days is a good thing for all of us. I’m excited about the opportunity to be in the booth for this one.”
For this broadcast, Amsinger and DeRosa will be joined by prospect expert Jonathan Mayo of MLB.com’s MLB Pipeline. And they should bring quite the interesting approach to it. But the MLBN-exclusive telecast is just one of six on the network during this Spring Breakout showcase, with the others being simulcasts of a regional sports network feed. Here’s the full MLBN schedule for Spring Breakout:
Looking ahead to the future.
SIX #SpringBreakout games will be broadcast live on @MLBNetwork. pic.twitter.com/NSmFgCnIKT
— MLB (@MLB) February 28, 2024
And on Thursday, MLBN will reveal the full Spring Breakout rosters for all 30 clubs in a special MLB Tonight program at 11 a.m. ET. So that should further help build the anticipation for next week’s event (which has its full broadcast schedule here, with most of the games not on MLBN available through MLB.com).
In an era where prospects are drawing a lot of attention, it’s interesting to see MLB try this kind of event. And it’s notable to see them using MLBN as part of the distribution of it, from simulcasting five games on RSNs to producing this Marlins-Cardinals one themselves. We’ll see how the Spring Breakout goes for the league and what kind of attention it draws.
