Barry Jackson of the Miami Herald reports on Thursday night that veteran broadcaster Rod Allen will not be part of the television booth going forward for the Miami Marlins.
According to Jackson, the Marlins will go with a three-man rotation for color commentators in the 2026 MLB season, featuring Jeff Nelson and Tommy Hutton combining to call 130 games and Gaby Sánchez doing the rest.
While Allen will no longer be in the TV booth, he will still “have a role” as an analyst for Marlins pregame and postgame TV coverage, as well as for some radio broadcasts, according to Jackson.
Allen became a TV analyst for the Marlins ahead of the 2022 MLB season.
The former major-league outfielder is best known for his time as a Detroit Tigers color commentator from 2003 to 2018, and for the way that tenure ended.
In September 2018, Allen allegedly assaulted his Detroit broadcast partner, play-by-play announcer Mario Impemba, by allegedly choking Impemba from behind in an altercation over a chair. Allen and Impemba were removed from the booth for the 22 remaining games of the 2018 season and never returned to their roles.
Allen told the Detroit Free Press in 2021 that the reports of a chokehold were “not true.”
“We both got caught up and a lot of foul words were exchanged,” Allen told the Detroit Free Press. “But there’s one part of the story that everybody has heard that is just false. It was written that I had allegedly chased him down and then choked him, and that is just not true. The incident was not at all that serious. It was not violent. Whoever put that out there did so because they wanted to assassinate my character and make me out to be the bad guy.”
Allen returned to the broadcast booth for the first time after the altercation by calling a few Arizona Diamondbacks games on the radio in 2021. He began his broadcasting career as a color commentator for the Diamondbacks from 1998 through 2002. He also used to work as a national broadcaster for Fox Saturday Baseball.
All nine MLB organizations that were under contract with Main Street Sports Group, owner of the FanDuel Sports Networks, decided to take their media rights elsewhere earlier in February. At least seven of those franchises, including the Marlins, will have MLB-produced broadcasts and distribution.
About Matt Clapp
Matt is an editor/writer at The Comeback and Awful Announcing.
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