This weekend marks the first of 18 Sunday games being produced by NBC Sports this season
It has been more than two decades since NBC Sports produced a major league baseball game. It was Game 6 of the American League Championship Series in October 2000. Bob Costas and the late Joe Morgan were on call as the New York Yankees defeated the Seattle Mariners at Yankee Stadium to earn a Subway Series ticket.
That 7,873-day drought will end on Sunday when the latest pack of MLB games, MLB Sunday Leadoffdebuts on NBC and streams on Peacock featuring the Chicago White Sox vs. the Boston Red Sox at 11:30 p.m. ET.
It’s the first of 18 consecutive Sundays that NBC has exclusively broadcast a Major League Baseball game live on Peacock. It’s also the latest in a series of streaming-exclusive games Friday night baseball on Apple TV+, YouTube Game of the Week and a bundle of New York Yankees games on Amazon Prime.
“We will have a lot of fun with it” Sam Flood, Executive Producer/President, Producer, NBC-Sport, said in a media briefing on Wednesday. “Most importantly, we honor and celebrate the game of baseball, a game that means a lot to NBC Sports and the group of people here who are tasked with telling the story of the game every week.”
That MLB Sunday Leadoff The package brings live baseball to a much earlier window in the day than traditional: start time for the first six Sunday games is 11:30 am ET; the remaining 12 games start at 12.00. The package also guarantees that no other MLB game starts before 1:30 p.m. ET each Sunday. On each of Peacock’s 18 Sundays, the streaming service is the exclusive home of live MLB action until 1:30 p.m., when the rest of the day’s schedule begins.
“We had seen success in the late morning time slot with the Premier League,” he said Rick Cordella, EVP/Chief Commercial Officer, Peacock. “We asked because we knew baseball played games in the mornings – [for example,] on Patriots’ Day in Boston – and to Baseball’s credit, they were open about it. We had spoken with Baseball for a long time before we came to an agreement. We were looking for something unique, not just another game. Again, I salute baseball: We came up with this crazy idea, and they said yes. But it was always a big part of what we were trying to do.”
These will be full on-site productions each week with a truck, full production/operations teams and talent in the stadium. MLB Sunday Leadoff Games are produced in the truck of Matt Borzello and longtime baseball director John Moore in the director’s chair at the beginning. The plan is for Moore, who has directed baseball games since 1980 and for big companies like MLB International and the YES Network, to referee the first three or four games to get the package rolling. An NBC Sports Staff Director to be named will then take over.
A representative from NBC Sports estimates that each game will feature at least eight hard cams in traditional broadcast positions and two super slow mos. It has also been confirmed that NBC will use its own version of an on-field mirrorless camera in a stabilized gimbal shoot with a shallow depth of field effect.
“We have a great team of engineers and operations staff,” Flood said. “Give the team a challenge and they will exceed expectations and always improve the viewing experience.”
In terms of on-screen looks, the Peacock games will be a hybrid of the new graphics pack and Scorebug introduced by NBC Sports Regional Networks earlier this season, with some new elements to reflect the big NBC and Peacock branding to integrate. Flood also noted that the network will attempt to pay tribute to the history of Major League Baseball on NBC with throwbacks to previously used graphic elements and even music.
“It’s going to be a hyper-local TV show with a national flair,” he said. “We’re definitely going to tip our cap to the rich history of baseball on NBC between some musical elements and some graphic elements. We’ll also advance with some new techniques and new items to try along the way. We’ll be showing our cap to Little League and Youth Baseball, some of the players in the game, and connecting today’s stars to their beginnings on the diamond before they became stars.”
