Baseball is back on NBC, and it’s enough to make anyone nostalgic, including the great Bob Costas, who spent the better part of two decades as the sport’s voice on the network and became one of its great storytellers with his iconic pregame monologues.
Awful Announcing has learned that NBC will open today’s Pirates-Mets game at 1 p.m. ET with a Costas-narrated monologue built around everything that makes Opening Day what it is. The clean slate. The renewed hope. The sense that today is different from every other day on the baseball calendar.
The format is Costas’s signature, and one he’s long believed other broadcast partners never fully understood. In a 2024 interview on The Press Box podcast, he described how NBC produced those signature video essays — not for every game, but for the biggest ones — and why he believes the approach was never replicated elsewhere.
“Dick Ebersol brought a storytelling perspective to almost everything,” Costas said at the time. “The idea was to take an already good product and amplify everything that was appealing about it and to tell stories in dramatic ways.”
The goal, he explained, was to frame the game in the most dramatic fashion possible — not to manufacture emotion — but to honor the emotion that was already there.
“It was an amplification of the drama, the legitimate drama, the legitimate stakes, the legitimate narrative,” he continued. “I can’t tell you how many people have told me over the years, I’m sure it’s thousands by now, ‘Those openings gave me goosebumps.'”
When NBC debuted Sunday Night Basketball in February, Costas was front and center, narrating an open with the sounds of “Roundball Rock” at Madison Square Garden, his first on-site NBA appearance for the network since 2002. Standing on the court before Knicks-Lakers, he acknowledged the last time the NBA lived on NBC, Shaq and Kobe were finishing off a three-peat. Rather than glossing over the 24-year absence, he leaned into it, using it to frame what the return meant.
Now NBC has baseball again, and with it a chance to bring that kind of storytelling back to the sport.
You may want to pull up a chair.
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.