There is going to be a lot of baseball on your TV on Wednesday and Thursday. ESPN will leverage its relationship with Major League Baseball and take advantage of all that content with a new show for ESPN+ called Squeeze Play.
Squeeze Play is the Major League Baseball postseason’s answer to the NFL RedZone channel. Jason Benetti, Kyle Peterson and Mike Petriello will serve as hosts for a whip around style show covering all eight games on Wednesday. They will do it all again on Thursday.
The trio of hosts will be connected via video conference. Benetti joked that he would stay comfortable in his home with six screens, his fridge steps away and a strategically placed pizza order.
“Normally I do deep dish, but I’m thinking I might do thin crust because of the heft of the pizza over a nine-hour day,” he told Phil Rosenthall during an interview for the Chicago Tribune. “A food coma is not ideal while doing television.”
Whip-around coverage is nothing new in the sports world. The aforementioned RedZone channel is a staple of Sunday NFL viewing. Before bringing the Turner networks into the fold, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament was routinely presented with whip-around coverage anchored from a studio in New York.
This won’t even be the first time Major League Baseball takes advantage of whip-around coverage. The status of MLB Change Up is up in the air over at DAZN. The streaming service signed a deal for “near live rights” over the next three years with MLB in 2019, but the show was shelved for 2020 when the two sides could not agree on a price for rights for a shortened 2020 season.
With the playoffs expanding this season, Major League Baseball had a lot more inventory to offer its media partners. With the two League Championship Series going to FOX and TBS respectively, allowing ESPN to present a digital product that features action from every game seems like the best “extra” the league could offer.
