With the 2014 Major League Baseball beginning tomorrow with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Arizona Diamondbacks' two-game series at the Sydney Cricket Ground in Australia (although Opening Night in North America is actually a week on Sunday), I thought I would run down the details of the major changes in the commentary boxes of the national US broadcasters that cover the sport.
The big question at the end of last season was who would be replacing
Tim McCarver as Fox's lead colour commentator alongside Joe Buck, with McCarver having retired from national broadcasting after an 18-year run with Fox (although, as expected, McCarver has reached a deal to work as a guest co-commentator on
about 30 St. Louis Cardinals games for their local television network Fox Sports Midwest this year).
Earlier this month,
Fox officially announced that
Harold Reynolds and
Tom Verducci will be joining Buck on Fox's coverage of Saturday Games of the Week, the All-Star Game, a League Championship Series and the World Series.
Reynolds was an ESPN Baseball Tonight pundit for a ten-year period in the 1990s and 2000s before being dismissed in relation to a harassment lawsuit that was later settled, with him going onto return to punditry on TBS and then the MLB Network. Verducci is an interesting call as he is not a former Major League player but a journalist, working as a Baseball Insider for Sports Illustrated and the MLB Network. He has been a field reporter for TBS on their postseason coverage in previous years but has also done some co-commentaries for Fox's regional telecasts during the regular season and seems to be well received from what I've heard online.
While Fox have settled on Buck, Reynolds and Verducci as their top team their recruiting hasn't stopped there, with them
bringing in Matt Vasgersian and
John Smoltz as their secondary baseball commentary team, primarily to work on MLB games on their new Fox Sports 1 channel as well as regional opt-out Game of the Week telecasts. Vasgersian and Smoltz have both worked for the MLB Network in recent years (with Smoltz being a mainstay on TBS' baseball coverage since his playing retirement) and both will continue their work with the league's channel. Indeed they'll be the MLB Network's commentators on the Dodgers-Diamondbacks series this weekend.
The biggest bit of news regarding the regional sports network broadcasting of each team is that the Los Angeles Dodgers have established a new channel for 2014 onwards -
SportsNet LA. Ahead of the new channel's launch, the Dodgers poached
two major colour commentators from ESPN,
Orel Hershiser and
Nomar Garciaparra. Both will be involved in the channel's pre- and post-game shows as well away game commentaries, although the doyen of baseball broadcasters Vin Scully is still going strong as the Dodgers' solo announcer of all of their home games plus away games in California and Arizona, doubling up on the Dodgers radio network during the first three innings of these games, with Charley Steiner and Rick Monday taking over from the fourth inning. But for the games that Scully is absent from, it'll be Steiner and Hershiser for SportsNet LA with Monday and Garciaparra on the radio side.
In order to fill the gap left by Orel Hershiser on Sunday Night Baseball,
ESPN announced late last year that
Curt Schilling would be joining Dan Shulman and John Kruk in the three-man Sunday night booth in 2014. Subsequently, it's been announced that Schilling - who will continue as a Baseball Tonight studio analyst - has contracted cancer and so will be taking time out while he recovers. In the meantime, I believe SNB will use a two-man team of Shulman and Kruk. Monday Night Baseball's regular commentary trio remains as Dave O'Brien, Rick Sutcliffe and Aaron Boone, while it appears as if Wednesday Night Baseball will continue to rotate play-by-play and two co-commentators (one of which was often Garciaparra prior to his depature to the Dodgers) on a weekly basis.