Jason Benetti revealed during Sunday night’s sign-off of Guardians-Mariners that this week’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast — Cardinals at Tigers on April 6 — will feature Brad Thompson and Andy Dirks.
Bringing Dirks, who played for the Tigers from 2011-13, and Thompson, who pitched for the Cardinals from 2005-09, into the Sunday Night Baseball booth is a natural extension of NBC’s local analyst model, which puts analysts with direct ties to the teams playing that week alongside Benetti rather than a fixed national color commentator.
The format is one Benetti helped develop during Peacock’s Sunday Leadoff package in 2022 and 2023, and when he recently explained its appeal, he said the rotating analyst model reflects how many different personality types are drawn to baseball and how much richer the broadcast becomes when those personalities are actually represented.
This Sunday, Benetti will get to work with someone he already has a real relationship with, which the format doesn’t always guarantee. Scroll through our archives, and you’ll see headlines about the duo of Benetti and Dirks pretending to be golf announcers, or talking “seamin” on the hands, hot mics, White Lotus, Coldplay, and a host of other topics that are ancillary to the game, much to the dismay of Detroit radio host Pat Caputo.
And as you gear up for an NBC presentation that will essentially moonlight as a Tigers regional broadcast — plus Thompson — it’s worth noting the game airs on NBCSN and Peacock, as NBC wraps up its regular-season Sunday Night Basketball coverage that week.
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.