Ten seconds into a conversation about Thursday’s broadcast, Lauren Shehadi is already quoting James Earl Jones, and she isn’t doing it for effect. She means it literally. Baseball has been the connective tissue of her entire life — the thing that outlasted every other constant — and on Thursday night, Netflix’s broadcast of the Field of Dreams game will ask her to stand in the middle of that idea and report on it live, for a broadcast partner still figuring out how to tell stories like this one.
Netflix’s third and final swing at live baseball this season sends the Philadelphia Phillies and Minnesota Twins to Dyersville, Iowa, where a cornfield will serve as Shehadi’s home office for the evening. It is, by her own account, the assignment she has been unofficially preparing for since she was seven years old, dropped off at a Little League field by parents who worked the snack bar and stayed all day, every day, because that’s what the game asked of families like hers.
“Baseball in a cornfield for me reminds me of the simplicity of the game,” Shehadi told Awful Announcing. “Iowa farmland represents the fabric of America, and baseball is Americana. It’s just really nostalgic. I’m excited.”
Most broadcasters prepare for a tentpole event with production meetings. Shehadi did that too, but her preparation this week also included a rewatch of Field of Dreams, not for nostalgia’s sake alone, but as research. She was hunting for language.
“That’s so funny that you asked that, because you know what I was looking for? I was looking for the quotes,” she said. “Obviously you’re not going to shove those in where they’re not necessary in terms of making the moment overtake the broadcast. But in the movie, James Earl Jones says the one constant through all the years has been baseball, and I feel that. It’s been a constant for me throughout my life.”
Reverence without indulgence is the same balance Netflix has spent all season trying, and often failing, to strike. The streamer’s Opening Night broadcast in March buckled under the weight of its own cross-promotion, with WWE cameos and a shirtless Bert Kreischer crowding out an actual baseball game. July’s Home Run Derby broadcast mostly corrected course, tightening the format and dialing back the self-promotional bloat, even if a comedy bit from Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, and Jimmy Tatro still landed with a thud during the player introductions.
“It has been a beautiful marriage,” Shehadi said when asked about Netflix’s partnership with MLB. “Baseball purists like myself, we love our game. We love it how it is. So our first call with Netflix, they said, we’re honoring every game, we’re honoring the fabric of the game — everything that baseball players and fans love — and we’re going to add in our entertainment. Every single broadcast has been baseball plus entertainment, and they’ve woven it in beautifully.”
Fifteen years into covering baseball — first at MLB Network, where she’s been a fixture since 2012 and has co-hosted the network’s morning show, MLB Central, since its 2015 launch alongside Mark DeRosa and, later, Robert Flores — Shehadi has developed a pretty clear idea for what her job should entail.
“My job as a sideline reporter is to tell something to the viewer that they couldn’t possibly know if they weren’t there,” Shehadi said. “I don’t focus on the stats — this guy’s hitting this with runners in scoring position. I want to tell you, if you’re not there, what do I see? What could you not possibly know?”
This week, that meant sitting down with Don Mattingly and his son, Phillies general manager Preston Mattingly — the first father-son GM/manager combination in the history of the sport — and unpacking how one man’s love of the game became the foundation for another’s career. It also meant a planned conversation with Twins manager Derek Shelton about his own family ties to baseball.
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“I’m not going to tell Pedro [Martínez] when to throw his changeup, and I’m not going to tell Albert [Pujols] what hitters hit in a 3-1 count,” she said. “That’s not my job. My job is to facilitate them to talk about their expertise. And that’s what we’re doing on Netflix — with CC [Sabathia] and Hunter Pence and Barry Bonds and Pujols, my job is to ask the questions and let them tell what it’s like to be in a game situation at the highest level.”
Shehadi’s admiration for Netflix’s lead host, Elle Duncan — who left ESPN to become the streamer’s first full-time sports broadcaster and has anchored all three of its MLB broadcasts this year — comes from a technique she learned in broadcasting school and has watched Duncan execute across a sport that wasn’t necessarily her main focal point at the Worldwide Leader.
“The camera is your friend,” Shehadi said. “Instead of talking to the camera, you’re talking to your friend. Elle does that with the best of them — ‘Hey, come on inside, we’ve missed you all week.’ That’s what separates personalities on camera, and she has the heaviest hitters, and she navigates it with ease while holding her own. It’s a difficult dynamic, and she’s mastered it.”
It was Duncan who, months before Netflix’s VP of sports Gabe Spitzer confirmed his involvement last week, pushed internally for Kevin Costner to be part of Wednesday’s broadcast, since Costner emerged from the same corn his character walked through in the film and narrated the White Sox and Yankees onto the field for the event’s inaugural installment in 2021.
“There was about three minutes when Kevin Costner came out, and the players walked out of the cornfield,” she said of Fox’s broadcast. “I’ll never forget — it was Aaron Judge — and they walked out, and there was silence. The broadcasters weren’t trying to make the moment. They let the moment make the moment. I think that’s going to be our goal, our challenge — to let this beautiful moment breathe.”
Ask Shehadi why this particular assignment resonates the way it does, and the answer eventually loops back to her own childhood in Northern Virginia, where her father kept score at every game she played as she manned first base with a scorer’s ruthlessness she still remembers.
“The shortstop would throw it to me, and I would miss the ball, and my dad would go, ‘E3! E3! You’re an error,'” she said, laughing. “And I’d go, ‘Dad, come on, that was rolling, that was not my error.’ And he would say, ‘You pick up your teammates — it’s a life lesson.’ That was the first of many lessons I learned on a baseball field.”
It’s that inheritance that she expects to see mirrored in Dyersville on Thursday, in players who will bring their own families to a cornfield in the middle of a pennant race and, for one night, get to feel something the 162-game grind rarely allows.
“This is a business trip for these players,” she said. “They’re going to tell you that. But they light up. I got a childlike grin out of a couple of the Phillies when I asked if they were ready for the Field of Dreams. Over the course of 162, you do not get that reaction all the time.”
Those reactions are usually saved for seven-year-olds, but on Thursday, Shehadi gets to feel like one again.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.