MLB Postseason on TBS

Nine-time Major League Baseball All-Star Gary Sheffield will begin his third postseason as a studio analyst for Turner when he joins Casey Stern, Jimmy Rollins, and Pedro Martinez for TBS’s coverage of the American League playoffs, beginning Wednesday when the Oakland Athletics visit the New York Yankees in the AL Wild Card game.

Sheffield spoke with Awful Announcing on how he got started in broadcasting and why he thinks the AL playoffs will be uniquely exciting this season.

“It’s nothing that I planned on,” Sheffield told AA about his foray into commentary. After a 22-year career where he hit over 500 runs, stole more than 250 bases and won a batting title and a World Series, Sheffield had kids help to take care of at home and was in no rush to do much of anything.

But two days after he announced his retirement in 2011, ESPN came calling with a full-time offer to join the network as an analyst.

“I just wasn’t ready to do anything at the time, so I turned it down,” Sheffield, now 49, said.

A few years later, he was at a golf tournament at Lake Tahoe just casually chatting with some former professional athletes, including Charles Barkley. All of a sudden, Turner Sports’ VP of Talent Services Tara August walked up to him and asked, “can you bring that to camera?”

“Bring what to camera?” Sheffield replied. August said, that personality, drive and determination you’re bringing when you talk about the game.

“Can you bring that to TV?” she asked.

“All I said was I’m just being me,” Sheffield said. “Next thing you know, she hired me.”

There isn’t too much preparation for Sheffield before TBS pre and postgame coverage other than just watching games through such an experienced lens.

“I’m gonna talk about the game in a way I would envision it, what my eyes tell me,” he said. “My mission is to give the people what they want, and talk about the game in a way that they may not see it.”

What Sheffield is trying to do now with the proliferation of analytics and advanced stats is break those down based on how he sees the game based on 25 years of playing.

“It’s something that comes naturally to me,” he said. “I don’t even have to think about it.”

What Sheffield said was the biggest change in baseball since last postseason has been the influx of younger rookie managers with no prior managerial experience who lean on player relations and advanced metrics more than ever before. That group includes Boston’s Alex Cora and the Yankees’ Aaron Boone, who could potentially face one another next weekend in the American League Division Series.

Whereas past managers like Jim Leyland would kind of do these sabermetric type analyses in his head, Sheffield said,  now there are numbers, facts and charts to back that all up. Each offseason, Leyland would tell his general manager Dave Dombrowski, Sheffield’s manager-GM combo while he played with the Marlins and Tigers, to get lefty pitchers who had good numbers against fearsome hitters like Barry Bonds and David Ortiz for the playoffs, Sheffield said. 

Now these rookie managers will face extremely intense scrutiny of every minute detail, from lineup decisions and bullpen choices, to when to remove a starting pitcher. Cora and Boone have extensive postseason experience, but Sheffield said you never know what that pressure could start getting to them.

“They’re gonna manage differently. They have to manage differently,” he said. “They’re going to have to have a shorter hook. They’re going to have to be able to micromanage the pitching staff more than anyone else to determine if this guy has it or not.”

It’ll be hard for rookie managers to really get a feel for making these changes unless they experience them, Sheffield said.

“You gotta keep fresh arms out there,” he said. “All managers are going to manage that way because they can’t let certain guys get off.”

Despite playing careers in what’s now an older era of baseball, Sheffield said the TBS studio crew tries to embrace analytics.

“We don’t just base it on old school ways. We base it on right now and talk about what we see,” he said. “A lot of people talk about today’s game and say ‘well, they’re not as good as when we played,’ and all that. We don’t do any of that.”

When discussing different eras of baseball, Sheffield said he, Rollins and Martinez aren’t tethered to the notion that the time when they played was the best.

“We talk about these guys are as good as any era that ever played the game,” Sheffield said. “The game has changed. It’s supposed to change, and it’s supposed to get better with time.”

So along with Rollins, who Sheffield calls Smooth Jimmy, and Martinez, who said off the air “says a lot of words that we can’t understand,” will try to analyze what should be a really compelling AL playoffs, mixing their many years with experience with the new-age statistics and strategies that have become so overwhelmingly pervasive in the modern game.

[Photo via Turner Sports]

About Shlomo Sprung

Shlomo Sprung is a writer and columnist for Awful Announcing. He's also a senior contributor at Forbes and writes at FanSided, SI Knicks, YES Network and other publications.. A 2011 graduate of Columbia University’s Journalism School, he has previously worked for the New York Knicks, Business Insider, Sporting News and Major League Baseball. You should follow him on Twitter.