BALTIMORE — Jason Benetti’s 26-week road show was coming to a close in a couple hours, and as he held forth in his broadcast booth at Camden Yards, Orioles analyst Ben McDonald and Milwaukee Brewers color man Tim Dillard sat a few feet away from him, cramming for NBC’s final Sunday Night Baseball broadcast this season.
Preparation is the backbone of broadcasting, yet the relatively daring format for Sunday Night Baseball is forged on plunging into the unknown.
Rather than a fixed two- or three-person booth, NBC charged back into baseball by tabbing Benetti as their play-by-play man and paired him with announcers from each team, placing the glue guy in between a pair of expert voices.
Every week, there’d be no guarantee of chemistry. No chance to develop continuity. And plenty of chances for unfamiliarity to send the broadcast off track.
McDonald and Dillard might not have known it, but this is Benetti’s kind of thrill ride.
“I have to bring it not knowing what they’re going to bring and see how it coalesces. It’s like the job of a lifetime in so many ways,” Benetti tells USA TODAY Sports. “You get so many perspectives. I don’t know how many people watched all 26 of our Sunday nights.
“But if you put the range of that 26 up against any other series, it’s such a dazzling array of information and prisms through which you can see the game.”
Yet Benetti is the final medium through which those thoughts will pass. And it’s hard to consider this grand experiment anything but a rousing success.
NBC’s takeover of Sunday Night Baseball from ESPN resulted in a 62% increase in ratings, according to the network. While audience metrics have shifted over time, the series produced five games of at least 3 million viewers, the most for Sunday Night Baseball since 2010; a Yankees-Red Sox matchup drew 4 million viewers, the most-watched SNB game since August 2011.
The un-measurables might be more impressive.
NBC tabbed Benetti, 43, the TV voice of the Detroit Tigers, to carry this franchise. And told him to go out and vibe with a roving cadre of 31 color analysts, ranging from Hall of Famers (Andruw Jones) to former MVPs and Cy Young Award winners (Albert Pujols, Orel Hershiser, Roger Clemens) to utility players and spot starters (Lou Merloni, Mike Bacsik) to irreverent voices (Hunter Pence, John Kruk).
They did provide him some pieces of furniture, such as All-Star first basemen Joey Votto and Anthony Rizzo, giving Benetti the task of integrating broadcast newbies into a highly-watched fixture in NBC’s canon of Sunday night sports offerings.
“When you’re at a higher level than everyone you’re talking to – and Jason is more prepared than anyone, knows about what’s going on with the game right this very second – he can say less and figure out where he fits in and leave things to the other people he’s working with,” Votto tells USA TODAY Sports. “That, to me, is why he delivers such good results when he’s doing his work.
“To be able to be flexible enough to handle a couple former pitchers, transition to a couple position players, transition to a couple guys who never played the game, and be able to adapt, fit in, it’s not easy to do. But Jason does it quite well.”
In a sense, it’s a gig he’s been training for most of his life.
Live, from New York
Ask Benetti which broadcasters shaped his worldview as a youth growing up near Chicago, and he cites ESPN’s freewheeling NFL Primetime with Chris Berman and Tom Jackson and the many Chicago Bulls games that landed on NBC during Michael Jordan’s heyday.
“It seemed like Marv (Albert) did every Bulls game,” says Benetti of his fellow Syracuse grad.
But before Boomer and Marv, Benetti mentions a far greater cultural influence: Saturday Night Live.
“I’d sit there and watch it with my parents and memorize skits,” he says of growing up in Homewood, Illinois. “That was the thing we had to watch together.”
Nowadays, cultural touchstones are harder to come by. With streaming and social media constant competitors, and Big Football overshadowing every other sport, establishing a fixed beachhead for a sport like baseball is a massive challenge.
Taking a chance or two certainly can’t hurt.
“That’s how Saturday Night Live made its mark on the culture. It just became a thing,” says Benetti. “You hear ‘Live from New York,’ and everyone knows how to finish the sentence.
“We don’t have writers. But we do have guest stars every week. And it’s about putting them in the best position.”
That showtime element probably broke through best on Aug. 30, when a Reds-Cubs matchup put the cheery Rizzo in the booth alongside Jeff Brantley, the salty 63-year-old Reds analyst who goes by “Cowboy.”
Votto lurked by the Reds dugout. The byplay was constant, an energy often missing from any sports telecast, with Votto’s oddball confession he’d never eaten nachos causing a moderate hubbub on social media.
“I felt like Brantley-Votto-Rizzo was just one instance of like, the Peyton Manning (Saturday Night Live) United Way commercial. You don’t know until it happens,” says Benetti. “I hope, over the course of time, however long we have this and have everybody rotating in here, which I love dearly, I hope people will realize it’s a place you go where we don’t have writers, but you know you’re going to get something different.
“And there will be Easter eggs over the course of time.”
Votto says he’s constantly impressed by the pointed and thoughtful questions Benetti poses to managers in pregame production meetings, while processing the information in a manner that informs.
“He loves the sport. He’s an excellent listener,” says Votto. “And he knows how to take those strong skills and turn it in-game: ‘We’re coming into your house. You’re going to get to know me. And we’re going to have a good time together.
“‘But we’re going to make sure we stay on point with the game.’”
Enjoying 'the human experience'
That’s where Benetti’s broadcasting come-up helps. He called college basketball for ESPN and Fox Sports for more than a decade, putting him alongside the late, great Bill Walton and the still-rambunctious, 86-year-old Bill Raftery, among many others.
Walton, he says, taught him the art of letting the wheels wobble a little bit, yet never stray off the road.
“Bill was the kind of guy who was, ‘Just go. Go. The only way is forward.’ There was so much expertise and creativity in his mind,” says Benetti. “You’re not going to make factory-built parts with Bill Walton. And this show, to me, is the same way. You’re going to get something custom-built. In some way. I don’t know what it is. But it’s going to be that night, and it’s probably not going to be replicated.
“Because when are you going to get Ben McDonald, Tim Dillard, Joey Votto all in the same place together? Probably never. So, you might as well let ‘er rip. Do this game in front of you with these people around you.
“And enjoy the heck out of the human experience.”
The strange bedfellows can create spontaneity. Rangers broadcaster Mike Bacsik and Tigers analyst Dan Petry discovered, on the air, that they had a mutual friend. The combos can cross eras and baseball generations, and, Benetti says, conjure “thoughts they would have never expressed if the other person had not stoked that fire in their mind.”
“You discard the pretense of ‘broadcasting.’ You’re just doing this game and it’s not going to be the regulation thing people expect, with two people in a booth, this regular cadence. The best moments are the ones I never would have dreamed.”
The show isn’t quite over for NBC, which will broadcast the four, best-of-three wild card series beginning Sept. 27. It’s highly likely Benetti and the A crew will be on the Yankees-Red Sox series, with a second series on NBC and two more on Peacock.
It’s the first of NBC’s three-year contract to air Sunday Night Baseball, before Major League Baseball takes all of its broadcast rights to market after the 2028 season. Labor conditions willing, Benetti already has his eye on Act II.
“As we hit the finish line, Season 2 is right in my mind, right now,” says Benetti. “What is the evolution going to be? Because that’s how you have to see it. Everything is competition for everything else.
“But entertainment’s entertainment.”
Votto certainly understands that. The likely Hall of Famer has, as Benetti puts it, “has a little Andy Kaufman in him, in a good way. Because he’s always so immersed in the topic he’s doing.”
Yet it was Benetti who smoothed the transition for Votto, along with nearly three dozen parachuting analysts, creating compelling broadcasts more often than not.
“He’s easy to be around,” says Votto. “Sarcastic. Sharp. I feel challenged by him. I think that’s why it works for me.
“And I couldn’t imagine working with someone better.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 26 weeks, 31 analysts, one rock: How NBC 'Sunday Night Baseball' stayed on point
