CC Sabathia joining NBC’s ‘Inside the Pitch’ for Guardians-Braves on ‘Sunday Night Baseball’

CC Sabathia made a strong impression on Netflix’s Opening Night broadcast last month, sharing the booth with Matt Vasgersian and Hunter Pence for a Giants-Yankees game that was, by most accounts, better in the booth than it had any right to be given that none of the three had ever worked together before.

This Sunday, he’s taking on a different role for a different network.

NBC announced Tuesday that Sabathia will join Sunday Night Baseball for the Guardians-Braves game on April 12, hosting the pregame alongside Bob Costas and serving as the Inside the Pitch commentator during the game. Jason Benetti handles play-by-play, with Hall of Famer Andruw Jones and two-time Cy Young winner Corey Kluber in the booth alongside him.

When NBC unveiled the Inside the Pitch concept before the season, executive producer Sam Flood explained that during key at-bats, a former pitcher drops in to walk viewers through the throw-by-throw approach against a specific hitter, in real time, using the umpire cam that NBC has built into its coverage to show location and sequencing as it happens. The idea builds on the same instinct that produced NBC’s On the Bench NBA segments and Inside the Glass NHL coverage, which takes the viewer somewhere they’ve never been before to make what’s happening on the field make sense.

This is Tony Romo before a goal-line snap. The point is to do a trick for the viewers and guess right. Our review called it one of the more genuinely innovative things any network has done with baseball broadcasting in years, and singled out Adam Ottavino — who has since joined ESPN as an analyst while continuing his NBC work — as the clear star of the segment. Clayton Kershaw was the other anchor of the feature on Opening Day, showed genuine promise, and then revealed he won’t appear for NBC again until August.

With Ottavino not appearing on every broadcast, NBC appears to be using the concept as an opportunity to bring in former players with direct ties to the teams on the field. For a Guardians-Braves game, that points pretty naturally to Sabathia, who spent the first eight years of his career in Cleveland before becoming the pitcher most people think of when they think of the modern Yankees, even if his Hall of Fame case was built in both cities.

Sabathia has also been active in baseball media since retiring — he helped launch MLB Network’s Clubhouse Edition series in 2021 — and currently serves as a special assistant to commissioner Rob Manfred.