NBC Sports will cap the first season of its return to Major League Baseball with a 25-foot “House of (Wild) Cards” at 30 Rockefeller Center, as the network begins its exclusive coverage of the MLB Wild Card Series on Tuesday.
The structure, made up of 26 oversized custom trading cards highlighting each of the four Wild Card matchups, will serve as the centerpiece of two days of fan activations at 30 Rock on Tuesday and Wednesday, Awful Announcing has learned. Fans will also be able to watch games on a large screen during watch parties on Rockefeller Plaza, while the Topps Truck will give away sample MLB trading card packs while supplies last.
NBC has produced an accompanying on-air spot voiced by actor J.K. Simmons.
“By bringing the MLB Wild Card Series to 30 Rock, we’re giving fans an interactive destination that celebrates one of the biggest moments on the baseball calendar,” said Lyndsay Signor, NBC Sports’ senior vice president of sports marketing.
The “House of (Wild) Cards” is the final installment in a promotional campaign NBC has rolled out in stages throughout the first year of its three-year agreement with MLB. It began in February with a spot that premiered during NBC’s Super Bowl LX pregame show, in which Aaron Judge launched baseballs from the Bronx into 30 Rock, sending them crashing through the sets of Today, Law & Order: SVU, Saturday Night Live, and Late Night With Seth Meyers. The baseball theme carried into Opening Day, when NBC planted giant baseballs in the sidewalk outside MLB’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue in New York and at Universal CityWalk Hollywood.
Even if NBC’s marketing blitz isn’t quite your tempo, to borrow a line from its latest narrator, the network’s first season of Sunday Night Baseball hit all the right notes where it mattered most. NBC’s 14 primetime broadcasts averaged 2.7 million viewers, making it the most-watched Sunday Night Baseball season since 2007 and leaving Major League Baseball reportedly thrilled with the partnership’s debut. Five games cleared 3 million viewers, headlined by a June 28 Yankees-Red Sox showdown at Fenway Park that drew 4.0 million, the largest audience for a Sunday Night Baseball game since August 2011, while ESPN’s final season with the package averaged just 1.8 million.
NBC built its coverage around a format it first tested on Peacock’s MLB Sunday Leadoff in 2022 and 2023, when Jason Benetti anchored a three-person booth featuring one analyst with deep ties to each team. This season, the network carried that approach to Sunday nights, surrounding its play-by-play voices with familiar local analysts from both clubs and adding an “Inside the Pitch” analyst to offer a recently retired player’s perspective, a role that has featured Joey Votto, Anthony Rizzo, Clayton Kershaw, CC Sabathia, and Adam Ottavino throughout the season.
That format will follow NBC into October, per Awful Announcing’s Matt Clapp. The Wild Card Series opens Tuesday afternoon with Phillies-Braves at 2 p.m. ET on NBC and Peacock, with Matt Vasgersian on play-by-play alongside John Kruk, C.J. Nitkowski and Votto. White Sox-Astros follows at 5 p.m. on Peacock and NBCSN, featuring Tom McCarthy, Steve Stone, Geoff Blum and Ottavino. In primetime, Benetti will call Red Sox-Yankees at 8 p.m. on NBC and Peacock with Lou Merloni, Joe Girardi and Rizzo, before Dave Flemming, Jim Deshaies, Mark Grant and Kershaw close out the night with Cubs-Padres at 10 p.m. on Peacock and NBCSN.
The Wild Card Series also marks NBC’s first postseason baseball since the 2000 ALCS, ending a 26-year absence from October, and it’s the only postseason round included in the network’s current deal.
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.