You’d be hard-pressed to find a player who made more jaw-dropping catches over the last decade than Kevin Kiermaier. Now, he wants to explain how they were made.
Kiermaier, who joined MLB Network ahead of Opening Night, indicated that he wanted to use his defensive background as his primary lens for his first foray into broadcasting. On the Sports Media with Richard Deitsch podcast, the four-time Gold Glove winner explained what that actually looks like in practice, and why he pushed to make it the centerpiece of his role.
“Yeah, because you can sit here and watch baseball a lot for someone who never played it or played it way back in the day and give your insight,” Kiermaier said. “There’s just a special icing on the cake from someone who’s been there, done that, especially when I can kind of maybe at times take you through the thought process of when someone makes an incredible play — where it’s like, ‘OK, right here off the bat, we’re getting our first step, and we’re trying to gain five or six steps and look back at the ball so we can cover as much ground.’ And really break it down to a point where I’m not getting too crazy, putting it all into very simple terms for whoever’s watching out there.”
The value of that kind of access is something NBC’s Inside the Pitch has already demonstrated this season, pairing recently-retired pitchers (Adam Ottavino and Clayton Kershaw) with broadcasters during live at-bats to walk viewers through what is happening from the player’s perspective in real time. Kiermaier is making a version of the same argument for defense, specifically, that there is a category of baseball knowledge that lives almost entirely in the body of someone who has made those plays, and that it essentially disappears from the broadcast when nobody in the booth has been there.
“I know what I had to do to play, stick around for 10 years,” Kiermaier continued. “So now, even with the broadcasting stuff, I know where I’ll have much more comfort talking about something, and defense is always that category for me where I feel like I can talk it and know it better than anyone on the planet. So I’m going to let the world know and try to think out loud to everybody — ‘Hey, this is what I did. This is why I did it,’ — and try to connect to whoever I can.”
Kiermaier is on a one-year deal with the network, appearing three to four days a month. He acknowledged that traveling more is not realistic with three kids at home, but said he has every intention of continuing in sports media and is open to additional opportunities down the road, including more appearances on MLB Network.
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.