NBC’s rotating analyst format on ‘Sunday Night Baseball’ runs into first real problem

The idea behind NBC’s rotating analyst model for Sunday Night Baseball was sound enough on paper.

Jason Benetti — one of the best play-by-play voices in baseball, by most accounts — anchors every game, while former players with direct ties to the teams playing that week fill the analyst chairs beside him. Instead of a set analyst, NBC can parachute in team-specific knowledge, genuine personal history with the organizations, and insights that a permanent national analyst couldn’t replicate.

Three weeks into NBC’s first season of Sunday Night Baseball since returning to baseball after a 26-year absence, the dinner party — which Benetti compared to the format during his Peacock days — is running into a problem: not every guest is comfortable talking at the table.

Sunday’s Guardians-Braves broadcast put Corey Kluber and Andruw Jones in the booth alongside Benetti. The problem is that a Hall of Fame career and a functional broadcast career are related only in the most generous sense of the word. Kluber said as much himself ahead of Sunday’s game, telling the Akron Beacon Journal that broadcasting wasn’t a burning interest — it was more of a curiosity, something he was open to exploring. He was recommended for the opportunity by the Guardian’s PR department. He acknowledged he wouldn’t be flawless. That’s a refreshingly honest thing to say before your national television debut.

It is also, if you’re a viewer tuning into Sunday Night Baseball for the first time, not entirely reassuring.

Sunday Night Baseball on @NBCSports is very good, with one flaw. The great Jason Benetti needs a steady, solid analyst to complement his talents. Maybe a rotating crew with proven voices like Mark Grant and Orel Hershiser. Let’s get some consistent chemistry in the booth. #Braves

— David Carroll (@DAVIDCARROLL3) April 12, 2026

Jason Benetti is the best PBP guy in MLB but he can’t carry these guys. NBC needs a true color
commentator for these games and should use people associated with the team as a part of the pregame.

— Mike (@78ML2) April 12, 2026

I’m gonna predict now that NBC hires a full time MLB analyst next season. The experiment of using one analyst from each team is not helping or enhancing the broadcast at all.

— Jimmy Traina (@JimmyTraina) April 13, 2026

Feels like NBC knows how rough this set of analysts is and is leaning on Costas with the game out of hand.

— Rick Jacobs (@boxthislap2x) April 13, 2026

Benetti is elite. He can carry a broadcast and has done it under far more difficult circumstances. But carrying a broadcast and elevating it are different things, and the rotating analyst format works only as well as the analysts it rotates in. When the model debuted on the season’s first Sunday Night Baseball — the Guardians visiting the Mariners in March — Rick Manning was in the booth for Cleveland. Manning has been calling Guardians games since 1990. He has been doing this for 36 years. The comfort level, the authority, the instinct for when to talk and when to let the game breathe, those are things you develop over decades, not days.

None of this is a knock on either man as a person or as a baseball mind. Jones knows the Braves and what it means to play center field at that level better than virtually anyone alive. Kluber understands pitching sequencing and preparation with the kind of granular specificity that the Inside the Pitch format — NBC’s real innovation this year — was built to showcase. Unfortunately for Kluber, CC Sabathia was tasked with that role on Sunday’s broadcast.

The question isn’t whether they know baseball. It’s whether knowing baseball and talking about baseball on live national TV are the same skill, and the uncomfortable answer is that they are not, and the gap between them tends to be widest on someone’s first time in front of a camera at this scale.

The format NBC chose was always going to produce this problem eventually, if the network opted not to use traditional analysts. When you commit to using different analysts every week, you’re committing to a range of broadcasting experience that spans from seasoned veterans like Manning — who could slot into any national booth and not miss a beat — to first-timers who are, by definition, learning the job in public. The team-specificity is real and valuable. But it comes with a cost that becomes apparent the moment someone brilliant at baseball sits in front of a microphone and discovers that that brilliance doesn’t automatically translate.

The solution isn’t necessarily to abandon the format. The local knowledge elevates the broadcast when the analyst has the tools to deliver it. What Sunday suggested is that NBC may need to be more selective about which local voices it puts in the booth versus which ones it directs toward the pregame show, where Sabathia was, incidentally, very good alongside Bob Costas. There is no shame in being a great analyst for a pregame segment, but it is a less natural fit for three hours of offering your thoughts on carefully selected nuggets. Take Dexter Fowler, for example.

Benetti is good enough to make the format work, even when it doesn’t. The experiment is still in its early stages, and the sample size is small. But Sunday was the first real test of what happens when the pedigree on paper doesn’t match the performance in the booth, and it might not be the last.