NBC is bringing back a familiar format for its baseball coverage.
The network is expected to hire Jason Benetti as its play-by-play voice for Sunday Night Baseball and plans to use local analysts in the booth, according to The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand. Awful Announcing has confirmed that NBC plans to mirror what it does with MLB Sunday Leadoff on Peacock from 2022-23 — at least from an analyst standpoint — as the play-by-play voice (presumably Benetti) will call games alongside a rotating group of analysts with ties to the teams playing that week.
When Sunday Leadoff debuted on Peacock in 2022, Benetti anchored the broadcasts while working with different analysts each week — Kevin Youkilis and Steve Stone for White Sox-Red Sox, for example — providing team-specific insight that a national analyst wouldn’t have. The setup continued in 2023 when Brendan Burke took over play-by-play duties after Benetti left for Fox Sports.
The Sunday Leadoff package itself had a winding journey. NBC created it for Peacock in 2022 and 2023, paying $30 million annually for 18 Sunday morning/early afternoon games. The network let the deal expire after 2023, and Roku picked up the package in 2024 for just $10 million per year — a third of what NBC originally paid. But when NBC secured Sunday Night Baseball rights in late 2025, it reclaimed the Sunday morning package as part of the deal, creating a makeshift baseball doubleheader on most Sundays with games on Peacock in the morning and NBC in primetime.
NBC’s three-year deal with MLB starts March 26, when the Mets host the Pirates and the Dodgers raise their World Series banner before taking on the Diamondbacks. The network gets 25 Sunday Night Baseball games a season, the entire Wild Card round, exclusive primetime slots on Opening Day and Labor Day, and the 18-game Sunday Leadoff package.
Benetti remains the frontrunner for NBC’s lead play-by-play role, as multiple reports have previously indicated, though the network hasn’t formally announced its broadcast team yet. Fox would need to grant Benetti permission to take the NBC job since his contract doesn’t expire until later this year. Benetti currently calls MLB, college football, college basketball, and occasional NFL games for Fox Sports while also serving as the television voice of the Detroit Tigers.
When Peacock debuted the rotating format in 2022, Benetti compared the job to hosting a dinner party. He brought up a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode about finding “the best dinner party middle,” which is the person in the center of the table who keeps the conversation moving, no matter who’s sitting around them.
“There’s a reason we picked Jason,” NBC Sports executive producer Sam Flood said at the time. “We did our homework. We know him. We love what he does, and we think he’s the perfect person to be in that middle seat at the dinner party.”
The network’s first broadcast is March 26 — less than five weeks away — and NBC still hasn’t formally announced Benetti or anyone else for the play-by-play role. On the studio side, Ahmed Fareed will host the Sunday Night Baseball pregame show, while Bob Costas takes what he and NBC have called an “emeritus role,” contributing on-site rather than from the desk. Clayton Kershaw, Anthony Rizzo, and Joey Votto round out the crew as pregame analysts for the Wild Card round and select regular-season games.
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.