The debate over in-game, during-play interviews in MLB has raged for years. The practice’s critics gain further ammunition whenever a mic’d-up player makes an error during an interview. That’s what happened with the New York Yankees’ Jazz Chisholm Jr. during their Sunday Night Baseball clash with the Boston Red Sox this week.
In the top of the third, a booth interview with Chisholm was cut off by a ground ball in his direction. He ranged left from third and gloved the ball successfully, but spun and threw it well behind first base. That led to him letting out a ‘Dammit!’ as the runner advanced to second.
In fairness, Chisholm cuts off his answer to the booth before the pitch is thrown and focuses in on the ball. It isn’t certain that the interview was at fault for his error here, or that he would have made the play if he wasn’t mic’d up. But there’s at least an argument this might have distracted him, and it certainly led to a lot of people bashing this practice. Here’s a sampling of that reaction:
The anti-ingame interview team now has all of Yankee Nation on board. Game over, #ESPN!#RepBX #mlb
— National Beachball League (@NatlBeachball25) June 9, 2025
The anti-ingame interview team now has all of Yankee Nation on board. Game over, #ESPN!#RepBX #mlb
— National Beachball League (@NatlBeachball25) June 9, 2025
There are a few points of context worth noting on the current state of in-game interviews with mic’d-up players in MLB. For one, players aren’t forced to do this. Networks (particularly ESPN on Sunday Night Baseball at the moment, but others have done it at times) can propose it to certain players, and players who accept receive $10,000 per interview from MLB and the MLBPA. But that’s a small amount of money relative to MLB contracts, and many players do opt out, and if others felt it would impact their performance, they likely would do so as well.
Also, for all the cases of mic’d-up messups, there have been many great plays made while wearing a mic as well. And, for what it’s worth, ESPN’s broadcasters are well aware of the perception these interviews make on-field play harder for their subjects, and try to avoid adding any further complications there. In a 2022 Sports Illustrated piece on this, Emma Baccellieri got some notable quotes both from Sunday Night Baseball voice Karl Ravech and from mic’d-up subject Alex Verdugo:
“They’re doing their job,” Ravech says. “We don’t ever want to interfere with that.”
“We trust them to speak when it makes sense, and they trust us to ask questions and realize, look, there may have to be a pause here.”
…And as for what it means to hold a conversation while trying to do his job? It’s actually kind of nice, [Verdugo] says, to have something else to focus on while standing by himself in the outfield.
“I’m always all over the place,” Verdugo says. “Like, I’m focusing on the game, but I’m always looking at everything, right? So this was cool.”
As long as networks want to do this, and as long as players are interested, this practice will probably remain. But network interest going forward is not guaranteed, especially as this has been most-used by ESPN, and they’re currently set to be without MLB rights after this season (although there’s been some talk of a reworking). If whatever national successor broadcaster or broadcasters MLB finds aren’t as into the mic’d-up interviews, maybe these will become less prominent, or not used at all. But they’re certainly still a thing for now, and errors around them like Chisholm’s present an obvious target for critics of this approach.