Erin Andrews isn’t coming back to baseball anytime soon.
The Fox Sports NFL sideline reporter opened up about her decision to leave the network’s MLB coverage on her Calm Down podcast with Charissa Thompson. Andrews worked the 2014 and 2015 World Series for Fox before stepping away from baseball entirely in 2016 when she re-signed with the network to focus exclusively on football.
And that’s because she felt like she was playing catch-up the entire time.
“I found that coming in at the end of the year after, you know, covering football and then jumping [in], I felt like I was doing a disservice to people that were watching at home,” Andrews said. “I felt like there were other people that had covered it all throughout the year that knew the ins and outs.”
Andrews compared it to someone parachuting into football for the playoffs without following the sport all season. The storylines, the context, the subplots that develop over six months, all of that matters when you’re trying to inform viewers.
“That’s how I think about with football,” she continued. “If you’re not covering football all year long, and then you’re jumping into the playoffs, you don’t know the storylines. You don’t know what’s going on in the meetings,” she said. “And I just felt like I was not giving what I could give, and what other people could do, like a Kenny Rosenthal.”
Thompson called it “such a mature position to take.” And it is. Andrews has been Fox’s lead NFL sideline reporter since 2014, working alongside Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, and now Kevin Burkhardt and Tom Brady on the network’s top games. She’s covered four Super Bowls and 10 NFC Championship games for Fox. That’s where her expertise is. That’s where she’s spent the time.
Rosenthal has been Fox’s baseball insider since 2005. He’s covered every postseason for the network since 2006 and writes for The Athletic year-round.
“I almost felt stupid,” Andrews admitted. “And the catch-up was really, really hard.”
As for Thompson, her background actually includes some baseball work early in her career. She filled in as a host for Colorado Rockies coverage while working at Fox Sports Net Rocky Mountain in 2007. But like Andrews, she’s built her career around football. She hosts Fox NFL Kickoff and the pregame show for Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football.
Andrews has made it clear she’s happy where she is. She re-signed with Fox in 2016 specifically to step back from MLB and commit to football. The network supported the decision, with then-president of production John Entz saying they “fully support Erin’s decision to focus her role here at Fox on the NFL.”
She’s stuck with it ever since.
Whether Fox would even want her back in baseball at this point is another question. The network has built its postseason coverage around Rosenthal, Tom Verducci, and its regular broadcast teams. Adding Andrews back into that mix nine years later would be odd.
But Andrews has already answered that question herself. At this point in her career, she’s not interested.
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.