Matt Vasgersian is not calling every Sunday Leadoff game this season, and NBC’s executive producer Sam Flood made clear Monday that the network already has a plan for when he can’t.
On NBC Sports’ MLB preview media conference call, Flood confirmed that a second play-by-play announcer has agreed to handle the Leadoff dates Vasgersian won’t be available for — the network just isn’t ready to say who it is yet.
“There is another play-by-play we’re not ready to announce yet,” Flood said. “But there is one more that we’ve got conversations with and have agreed to a plan with.”
Vasgersian was announced on March 11 as the voice for “many” of the Sunday Leadoff games, a qualifier that left an obvious question hanging. Now we know there’s an answer, but it just hasn’t been made public. When NBC reclaimed the Sunday Leadoff package from Roku as part of its broader three-year deal with MLB, it set up a makeshift baseball doubleheader on most Sundays, with Peacock carrying a morning game before primetime’s Sunday Night Baseball on NBC. That’s a long day of baseball, and Vasgersian is already managing an extensive workload between Netflix’s Opening Night, NBC, and MLB Network. Having a second voice was always going to be necessary.
The name is worth watching closely. Awful Announcing identified several candidates for NBC’s MLB play-by-play roles last fall, and Brendan Burke was among the most obvious fits. Burke called the original Peacock Leadoff package in 2023 after Jason Benetti departed for Fox, and he’s been a fixture in NBC’s broader universe ever since, handling Big Ten games and Olympic hockey assignments for the network. He already knows what Leadoff looks like from the inside, which makes him the most logical candidate to step in when Vasgersian has a conflict. But Flood wasn’t offering hints Monday, so that remains speculation.
Beyond the booth, Flood opened the door on something more ambitious. When asked whether NBC might experiment with field-level analysts during Leadoff games — similar to what the network has been doing with On the Bench in the NBA — he said the idea is genuinely in play.
“We will have reporters in the Leadoff games, and we do like the idea of trying something like in the dugout, like On the Bench,” Flood said. “We’re working through some ideas there, but some process there.”
On the Bench has been one of the more interesting things NBC has done in its first NBA season. The format places Robbie Hummel and Austin Rivers — one per team — directly next to the assistant coaches for every Monday night NBA game on Peacock, giving them access to pregame shootarounds, locker rooms, and live huddles during timeouts.
As we covered when the format debuted, the logistics alone are a challenge most broadcast crews never have to think about, being that Hummel and Rivers can’t see each other, can barely see the play-by-play voice, and have to coordinate without the normal nonverbal cues a traditional booth provides. Hummel was candid about the trust dimension when he broke down the format’s challenges with Richard Deitsch, saying, “It’s on the three of us to make them understand that ‘alright, this group isn’t going to screw us.’ For Austin and I, our goal is to be pretty much invisible.”
Knowing what play is coming and deciding how much of that you’re actually allowed to say is the tightrope Hummel and Rivers walk during every broadcast. They landed on waiting until just before the ball gets inbounded before surfacing anything specific. Peacock operates on a delay, so it’s not like opposing coaches are watching the broadcast in real time and radioing their bench. But that’s almost beside the point. The issue is whether NBA coaches believe NBC will respect what they’re hearing in those huddles, and that belief comes from Hummel and Rivers proving week after week that the access won’t be burned. The catch, as Flood acknowledged Monday, is that the same dynamic applies to baseball. Getting a dugout analyst isn’t something NBC can simply announce its way into. That trust has to be built from scratch, with a different sport and a different set of organizations.
“Just like with On the Bench, where we have to have conversations with a number of people to make sure the access we were getting in the NBA wasn’t intrusive to the teams,” he said. “We made it our mission — we didn’t say trust us; we said we will earn your trust. And that’s what we intend to do with whatever access points we end up with in the baseball world.”
Threading through all of this is Adam Ottavino, whose exact positioning NBC is still keeping under wraps. Flood said again Monday that Ottavino will be placed “in a unique spot” that puts him in the middle of the action, without specifying what that means. Ottavino is already central to NBC’s “Inside the Pitch” concept, where he’ll walk viewers through a pitcher’s approach to specific hitters in real time during an at-bat, and the network has built the broadcast around having him as close to the game as possible.
NBC can get creative with Ottavino’s setup, but this still hinges on who’s on the other mic when it’s not Vasgersian.
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.