Credit: Netflix
By Sam Neumann on

Netflix arrived at Oracle Park on Wednesday night with 73 kayaks in McCovey Cove, a shirtless comedian, two WWE tag team champions, the all-time home run king, and the first pitch of the 2026 Major League Baseball season. It was exactly as chaotic as that sentence suggests, and somehow more.

There was a lot to like about what Netflix put together for Opening Night. There was also a lot that won’t survive contact with a normal Monday in July when the streamer airs its next baseball event. The challenge of reviewing this broadcast is that both things are equally true, and they sometimes happened within minutes of each other.

The pregame: genuinely good television buried under an avalanche of Netflix content

Elle Duncan was the best thing about the hour-long pregame show, which is saying something given that she was sharing a set with Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, and Anthony Rizzo. Duncan has been the face of Netflix’s sports coverage since leaving ESPN in December, and if Wednesday night was her audition for the platform’s premier sports anchor role, she passed with room to spare.

Bonds was a breath of fresh air, too. Having the all-time home run leader in San Francisco — in the park where he hit most of them, with 73 kayaks in McCovey Cove honoring his record-setting 2001 season — was the kind of resonant, purposeful booking that Netflix got exactly right. Bonds was candid in a way that broadcast analysts rarely are, acknowledging that he probably wasn’t the best teammate off the field while defending his on-field record. That’s more interesting television than anything Bert Kreischer produced in three appearances.

Which brings us to the problem.

As we noted in a separate piece on the pregame, Netflix treated the hour before first pitch less like a baseball broadcast and more like a very expensive promotional vehicle for its own content library. John Cena walked through the new Automatic Ball-Strike system — fine, actually, as a way to introduce ABS to a new audience — but he was also there to promote Little Brother, exclusively on Netflix. Kreischer was in a kayak in McCovey Cove, shirtless as always, to promote Free Bert. There was a Stranger Things promo. There was a Thrash promo. And, there was a Man on Fire promo. Jey Uso wasn’t introduced to the Oracle Park crowd until 8:20 p.m. — a full 20 minutes after game coverage began — as a promotion for Monday Night Raw on Netflix. The reaction from the San Francisco crowd, which had not come to a baseball game to watch WWE programming, was somewhere between confused and indifferent.

Netflix spent around $50 million on three baseball events specifically because live sports attract new subscribers, and those new subscribers need to know what else is on the platform. The Christmas Day NFL games ran the same playbook. But there is a difference between weaving promotional content naturally into a broadcast and stopping a baseball pregame to show a full promo for Stranger Things: Tales from ’85, complete with a spike-covered bat on the studio desk, and that difference was on full display Wednesday night.

The broadcast: strong where it counted, maddening where it didn’t

Once the first pitch arrived — delayed to 8:25 p.m. ET, 25 minutes after the advertised start — the broadcast settled into something considerably more coherent.

Matt Vasgersian was excellent. He carries a big-game feel naturally, and Opening Night required exactly that. In the booth alongside him, Hunter Pence and CC Sabathia talked over each other in the early innings — the predictable growing pain of a pairing that had never worked together before — but they settled quickly into something genuinely enjoyable.

The production wasn’t flawless, though. The center field camera had a color grading problem in the early innings, meaning that the camera is positioned in direct sunlight while home plate sits in complete shade, and the contrast between the two created an image that looked washed and inconsistent, like two different broadcasts trying to occupy the same frame. It corrected itself as the game went on.

Separately, the Adobe ad embedded on the backstop behind home plate cast an unnatural glow on Rafael Devers as he stood in the batter’s box, creating a jarring intrusion into what is otherwise an exceptionally clean picture.

It was a one-time thing. But Netflix spent the better part of Wednesday night trying to convince baseball fans that its production quality sets a new standard, and moments like that are the ones that stick when you’re making that argument. Neither issue was damaging on its own. On a night where the presentation was supposed to be a selling point, they were hard to ignore.

Those were the exceptions. For large stretches, the picture was second to none. Crisp, clean, and cinematic in a way that few baseball broadcasts have managed. The production infrastructure Netflix built for this was visible in every well-lit frame, and there were plenty of them.

The scorebug is a good example of what Netflix gets right and wrong at the same time. The concept is strong — it sits in the bottom-right corner, built around a near-three-dimensional basepath layout that shows runners on base in a way that feels modern and visually distinctive. At a glance, it looks great. The problem is that a scorebug isn’t supposed to be looked at; it’s supposed to be processed instantly, in the peripheral vision, while the eyes are on the game. And the moment you actually try to read it, the whole thing falls apart. The pitcher and batter information and the ball-strike count are rendered in a font so small that finding them mid-at-bat requires active effort.

The aesthetic is there. The functionality isn’t.

But the scorebug wasn’t the night’s real problem with priorities.

In the top of the fifth inning, with José Caballero at bat, Lauren Shehadi was at the lip of the Giants’ dugout conducting an in-game interview with manager Tony Vitello. It’s a segment that appears on every baseball broadcast in some form, as a quick conversation with a manager about how he’s reading the game, what adjustments he’s considering, and what he’s seeing from his starting pitcher. It’s supposed to be routine. It’s supposed to be forgettable. It’s not supposed to cost the viewer something historic.

While Shehadi’s interview was running, with the game action in the background and the broadcast fully committed to the dugout conversation, Major League Baseball recorded the first Automatic Ball-Strike challenge in regular-season history. The technology that has been debated, tested, and implemented as one of the most significant rule changes the sport has introduced in decades produced its first real moment of consequence, and Netflix missed it.

Not in the sense that the cameras caught it and the broadcast team acknowledged it in real time. Missed it in the sense that it happened off-screen, was not shown, was not discussed, and was barely acknowledged until after the fact, when the moment had already passed, and the only record of it for most viewers was the outrage on social media.

That is not Lauren Shehadi’s fault. She was doing her job, and she did it well all night. The fault belongs to whoever made the decision — in the production truck, in the rundown, wherever these calls get made — that a routine managerial interview was more important than the live game action happening behind it. On any other night, that decision is a minor annoyance. On the night of the first ABS challenge in baseball history, during Netflix’s debut MLB broadcast, it was the single most damaging thing that happened. You do not get to cover a historic first and then explain that you were busy with something else.

The sport kept moving, but the broadcast didn’t always keep pace.

The mid-inning Bert Kreischer interlude — a conversation with Kreischer while he was drinking a Corona in a kayak, shot in noticeably lower-quality camera work than the rest of the broadcast — was bad television on its own merits. The fact that it happened during the game made it worse.

The verdict

Netflix’s MLB debut was exactly what you’d expect from a streaming platform making its first real statement in baseball: ambitious, visually sharp, stuffed with celebrity appearances, occasionally excellent, and undermined by a fundamental tension between serving the sport and serving the platform. Elle Duncan is a star. Barry Bonds was worth every penny. Vasgersian, Pence, and Sabathia are a booth worth watching as it develops. The picture quality and production values set a standard.

But missing the first ABS challenge in baseball history because of a dugout interview is the kind of mistake that experienced broadcast operations don’t make, and the promotional volume during the pregame suggested a platform that hasn’t fully figured out where Netflix ends, and the baseball begins. Those two problems are related. Netflix treated Opening Night as a Netflix event that happened to include a baseball game, and the broadcast was better when it remembered which one people tuned in to see.

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.

View all posts by Sam Neumann