Jason Benetti ‘highly likely’ to call Yankees-Red Sox wild card series for NBC

It turns out, the Sept. 20 finale wasn’t the last word on NBC’s first season of Sunday Night Baseball.

The encore: a potential Yankees-Red Sox wild card series, the same matchup that delivered NBC’s biggest baseball audience of the year back in June.

That June 28 game at Fenway Park, which Jason Benetti called alongside Roger Clemens and Will Middlebrooks, averaged 4.0 million viewers across NBC and Peacock even though NBC didn’t pick it up until the bottom of the fourth inning, making it the most-watched Sunday Night Baseball game since a Yankees-Red Sox extra-innings game on ESPN in August 2011. It set the tone for a debut season MLB was said to be thrilled with, as NBC’s 14 primetime broadcasts averaged 2.7 million viewers, the most-watched Sunday Night Baseball season since 2007, with five games clearing 3 million and Dodgers-Yankees (3.9 million) finishing second only to Yankees-Red Sox.

Benetti anchored it all in a format NBC settled on in February, when Awful Announcing confirmed the network would pair its play-by-play voice with rotating analysts tied to each week’s teams, the same setup he worked on Peacock’s MLB Sunday Leadoff in 2022. After months as the frontrunner, Benetti was officially named to the job in March, and by season’s end he’d shared the booth with 31 different color analysts, with Joey Votto and Anthony Rizzo the closest things to fixtures.

Now, with NBC carrying all four best-of-three wild card series beginning Tuesday, Sept. 29, Benetti and the network’s top crew are “highly likely” to land Yankees-Red Sox, according to USA Today’s Gabe Lacques. One more series will air on NBC, with the remaining two on Peacock, in line with the split of two broadcast games per day and two streaming exclusives on Peacock and NBCSN that Sports Media Watch first reported last month. It will be NBC’s first postseason baseball since the 2000 ALCS.

It is unclear whether the bracket will actually deliver Yankees-Red Sox, and NBC has yet to formally announce its assignments. Benetti’s baseball calendar, of course, ends with the wild card round, the only postseason action in NBC’s package. His NBC calendar, on the other hand, is just getting started. After telling the Sports Media Watch podcast in June that he hadn’t discussed other sports with the network, Benetti joined NBC’s NBA rotation in August for somewhere between 10 and 20 regular-season and playoff games, building on an April debut calling Game 2 of Celtics-76ers with Robbie Hummel and Jordan Cornette. Six days later, NBC brought him into its college football lineup along with Dave Flemming, restoring the other half of the role he held at Fox, where he called Big Ten and Big 12 games alongside Robert Griffin III.

Regardless, a Yankees-Red Sox series would hand NBC up to three games featuring the two franchises that appeared in each of its three most-watched Sunday Night Baseball broadcasts this season. Perhaps the bracket shifts before Tuesday. Perhaps the series ends in two. But if it goes the distance, Benetti will be calling a winner-take-all Game 3 on Thursday, Oct. 1, and how much of that June audience follows the rivalry to a weekday remains to be seen.