Hunter Pence details his Netflix Opening Night debut

Hunter Pence called his Netflix debut on Opening Night a lot of things on the Baseball Tonight podcast with Buster Olney this week. Nervous was one of them. But the way he described it, the nerves weren’t all that different from the ones he felt stepping into the batter’s box for the first time in the big leagues.

“There’s similar feelings,” Pence told Olney. “Whenever you care about something or something you genuinely love, and it’s a performance, so to speak, obviously the game is the game, and you want to kind of stay out of the way of that and just share your experience and what you’ve learned in the game.”

Given the stage, anyone would have nerves, right? But Pence spent the back half of his playing career essentially building toward a moment like this — studying swing mechanics, biomechanics, the chess match between hitters and pitchers — so that by the time he sat down next to Matt Vasgersian and CC Sabathia on Wednesday night in San Francisco, he had 14 years of experience and a deep analytical toolkit to draw from.

“That knowing all of that stuff, it kind of gives you a lot of confidence behind it,” he said.

As we noted in our Opening Night review, Pence and CC Sabathia talked over each other in the early innings — which you might say is predictable given this particular booth pairing had never worked together before a national audience — but found a rhythm as the game went on, eventually settling into something that felt like two former players who actually wanted to teach the viewer something rather than fill air. Having Sabathia next to him meant he was never more than a turn of the head away from a Hall of Fame pitcher’s perspective on whatever was unfolding on the mound, and he made clear that having that resource in the booth was something he leaned on throughout the night.

The person he was most effusive about, though, was Matt Vasgersian. Pence told Olney that calling a game alongside Vasgersian makes the whole operation feel more natural than a first-time pairing has any right to — that his voice and his command of the broadcast create a kind of ease that is almost disorienting when you are the one sitting next to him.

“He’s so pro,” Pence said. “You honestly kind of get hypnotized by his voice. It’s so good. You feel like you’re playing MLB The Show or something. He’s just amazing.”

He also had kind words for Lauren Shehadi, too.

As for Pence himself, Thursday was the product of years of deliberate work. He joined MLB Network as an analyst in 2022, spent several seasons calling select Giants road games for NBC Sports Bay Area, and worked on ESPN’s Wild Card coverage, alongside Olney, last fall. Each assignment has been a little bigger than the last, and Opening Night on Netflix — in his home ballpark, in front of the largest audience he has had yet as a broadcaster — was the biggest of all of them. He came out of it feeling like he belonged there.