Jason Benetti didn’t just get a new gig. He got a whole lot of new boothmates.
With NBC taking over the “Sunday Night Baseball” franchise in 2026, the network also is returning to a staple of broadcasts of yesteryear. Benetti won’t have one full-time analyst he works with every week — this isn’t your Jon Miller and Joe Morgan “SNB” — but rather he’ll have two analysts each game, and they’ll rotate by the week. “SNB” will utilize a local analyst from each of the teams playing in that week’s game, the network’s way of providing more inside information, while cutting off criticism that the booth leans way or another.
Benetti will be the one staple, the moderator — the ringleader, if you will (though he’s not a fan of that term, having been to the circus once in his life). Some might view this format as a challenge. Benetti doesn’t.
“‘Challenge’ makes it sound like I’m lifting pianos or something. I’m not,” Benetti said this week on a conference call with reporters. “There are a lot of people with very difficult jobs in America. There are people who do plumbing in cold environments and have, like, 22 frozen pipe calls to get to on a Sunday night in an emergency situation. I’m not that. You know, I do think of our late, great former colleague Bill Walton, when I get asked about the difficult of partners or anything like that. Because Bill Walton was, quote-unquote, ‘difficult to wrangle.’ But if you think wrangling Bill Walton is the joy of working with him, you’ve got it all wrong. The point is to see the people for who they are and what their strengths are and for what they do best.
“It’s a little bit of a sociological crossword puzzle. And it’s pretty fun.”
Of course, Benetti, 43, has a lot of experience working with a wide variety of analysts. He does it as lead play-by-play man for the Tigers on Detroit SportsNet, where he works with a handful of color men, and he’s done it with his bustling schedule of national assignments — baseball, college basketball, college football, NFL, you name it.
Benetti’s resume is long and impressive, and the “SNB” gig might just be his biggest gig yet, a boon for a kid who grew up in Chicagoland watching NBC broadcast the World Series.
The “SNB” franchise was built on ESPN, where it ran from 1990-2025. With ESPN scaling back its baseball footprint this year, NBC jumped at the opportunity to expand its own. And Sam Flood, executive producer and president of production for NBC Sports, knew he wanted as his main guy if NBC ever got back into the game.
Benetti did baseball at the Olympics for NBC in 2021, and he also did “Sunday Leadoff” games for NBC streaming affiliate Peacock in 2022.
“It was not a difficult decision,” Flood said this week, as NBC embarks on its first prime-time partnership with Major League Baseball in a quarter-century (baseball was broadcast on NBC from 1947-89, and again from 1994-2000). “Always was going to be the first call we would make. … He’s a guy you want to have on your team, and a guy you want to be the face of your team and the lead character.
“We’re going to send him out to the mound every week and he’s going to throw heat and he’s going to mix it up. Then he’s going to throw the knuckleball, and we’ll have fun with it. That’s the most important part.
“He understands that it’s a job, it’s an adventure, but we’re in the entertainment business.”
Benetti joins NBC after Fox allowed him out of his contract early, and with the blessing of the Tigers, for whom Benetti will continue to call 120 or more games per season — while missing most Sunday Tigers games this year, where in previous years with Fox, he was absent from the Tigers on most Saturdays. “It’s a real tribute to the Tigers for realizing what this platform means and what this opportunity is, in Jason’s career and to build his brand,” said Flood, “which at the same time makes the Tigers a bigger game in the national spotlight.”
NBC’s prime-time schedule actually kicks off on a Thursday, Opening Day, and Benetti will be in Los Angeles to do the World Series-champion Dodgers’ game against the Arizona Diamondbacks. NBC has a tradition in other sports (NFL, NBA) of starting a season where banners are being raised, and there’s no exception in baseball this year. Orel Hershiser (Dodgers) and Luis Gonzalez (Diamondbacks) will be Benetti’s first analysts.
With Benetti doing the Opening Night game on NBC and Peacock, Dan Dickerson will do television for the Tigers’ season opener in San Diego, and Greg Gania will do the radio. Benetti’s first “SNB” game on an actual Sunday will be in Seattle for the Cleveland Guardians and Mariners (the Tigers are actually off that day). Benetti’s second “SNB” game on Sunday will be in his home booth, for the St. Louis Cardinals-Tigers game on April 5, Easter Sunday. It’ll be the return of Justin Verlander to Comerica Park, in the Olde English D.
The Tigers also are scheduled for “SNB” on May 3 (Texas Rangers) and May 10 (Kansas City Royals). No word yet on which Tigers analyst will join Benetti on the national broadcasts; those details are being finalized, Flood said.
“I think about this in a lot of ways, like when you have the conversation with your friends, ‘Hey, if you could be at a dinner party with three people from baseball history, who would it be?'” Benetti said. “I don’t know who everybody in America would say, but we’re going to try to do that every game.
“I’m just thrilled to help stoke the fire of that conversation.”
In taking the wheel of “SNB,” NBC is in some ways going back to its roots, with Flood, who produced several World Series games in the 1990s, in the fold, and Bob Costas, who called many of those World Series games, part of the production, as well. There’s a good chance you’ll see some nods to the vintage, like NBC recently had with the return of “Roundball Rock” on an NBA telecast. But NBC is looking for new twists too, and helping on that front will four analysts who also are recently retired players — Clayton Kershaw, Joey Votto, Anthony Rizzo and Adam Ottavino. Kershaw and Ottavino, specifically, will break down pitching sequences in real time.
Benetti is scheduled to call 27 prime-time games on NBC and Peacock in 2026, as well as games during the wild-card round of the playoffs. Peacock also will broadcast its “Sunday Leadoff” schedule, and NBC will have July 4 and Labor Day games, too.
That’s a whole bunch of analysts — but only one Benetti, who’s come a long way since his days broadcasting Salem Avalanche minor-league games, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains in southwest Virginia.
“There were a couple of booths in the Carolina League that wouldn’t even fit three people,” said Benetti, the voice of his hometown Chicago White Sox from 2016-23, before taking over the Tigers’ TV booth in 2024. “So if I told you that (this) was the dream, it would have been pretty far-fetched at the time. But for me, it has always been something that has meant a lot to me to be a really good play-by-play announcer.
“I’ve always wanted to do this since I had a radio station in high school. And without sounding like Ted Baxter from the ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ this is an honor for me.”
tpaul@detroitnews.com
@tonypaul1984
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Tigers loan Jason Benetti to the nation on Sunday nights: ‘It’s an honor for me’
Reporting by Tony Paul, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
