Jason Benetti explains why NBC’s ‘Inside the Pitch’ is unlike anything MLB broadcasting has done before

Two months into NBC’s Sunday Night Baseball experiment, Jason Benetti knows exactly what separates it from every baseball broadcast that came before it.

The “Inside the Pitch” concept — NBC executive producer Sam Flood’s live at-bat breakdown feature that debuted Opening Day alongside former pitchers Adam Ottavino and Clayton Kershaw — has drawn acclaim since the network’s first Sunday night broadcast in late March. But in an appearance on The Athletic’s Starkville podcast with Jayson Stark and Doug Glanville this week, Benetti made the most compelling case yet for why “Inside the Pitch” has changed what Sunday Night Baseball looks and sounds like.

“It wasn’t my idea, but I’m really glad they’ve parachuted me into it,” he said.

The reason it works, in Benetti’s telling, is that it takes the broadcast down to the level at which baseball is actually played. The pitcher-hitter confrontation has always been the sport’s intellectual and competitive core, but MLB broadcasts have historically treated it as scenery rather than subject matter.

“We know that so much of the game is decided between batter and pitcher,” Benetti said. “Most of this is all alchemy, as Adam Ottavino called it a couple of weeks ago — about deciding how to confound hitters. For pitchers, that is the whole idea. And you can do it with force — ‘The Miz,’ Jacob Misiorowski. You can do it with tunneling — the entire Cleveland Guardians pitching staff over the last decade. And you can do it with any sort of left-on-left splitter like Yuki Matsui. You can try to addle all hitters and put their brains in a blender, but we have somebody down there whose job it is to tell us what’s going on with that last pitch. That level of granular detail makes baseball an undeniable joy.”

What “Inside the Pitch” affords Benetti that no previous broadcast format has is the ability to redirect the conversation mid-at-bat to someone who has lived the experience from sixty feet, six inches away.

“The pleasure I get from being able to say, ‘Hey Adam, what did you see on that last swing?’ or ‘Hey [Anthony Rizzo], if you’re 3-2 here and he’s got four pitches, what are you prioritizing — location, pitch type, whatever…’ That’s how the game’s played, and I love that, and I appreciate the chance to do it honestly.”

Awful Announcing reviewed NBC’s debut broadcast here in March and found Ottavino particularly strong in the role, walking audiences through arm angles, pitch mix, and pitcher mindsets during what was otherwise an unremarkable game between Cleveland and Seattle, and noting that the concept makes brilliant use of the umpire cam, an innovation that had been in place for years without ever serving a real purpose until NBC built Inside the Pitch around it. Like “On the Bench” on NBA telecasts and “Inside the Glass” on NHL coverage, “Inside the Pitch” offers a ground-level perspective unavailable anywhere else, though where those concepts put viewers physically closer to the action, this one puts them inside the decision-making itself.

“What I believe is we’re taking the game to the level that it’s played at in talking about those split-second decisions,” Benetti said. “And if there’s anything most innovative about what Sam Flood, and Rick Cordella, and everybody at NBC have decided to do, it’s that.”