One of the new additions to the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball crew in 2022 is current YES Network color commentator and former MLB pitcher David Cone. Cone has been calling games for YES since 2011 and will join Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez in the broadcast booth this upcoming season.
Cone talked about the new role on his podcast, Toeing the Slab with David Cone, also hosted by Justin Shackil and James Smyth. The Cy Young winner mentioned how the exclusivity that Sunday Night Baseball provides is something that excites him about the position:
“You get the butterflies back. You get that itch back,” he said. “It’s hard to find after you’ve been a ballplayer, after you’ve pitched in a World Series, it’s hard to find that juice again. This kind of gives it to me. Doing the YES games gave it to me, but this is kind of next-level stuff.”
One of the things that Cone said he hopes to bring to the broadcast is the hitter-pitcher dynamic that he would have with Perez and it is something that he has tried to do with Paul O’Neill when he is calling games on YES with O’Neill and Michael Kay:
“For me, it is such a unique opportunity to work with guys like that and carve out our own niche because not too many people have had that seat,” he said.
David Cone has been a part of a different form of Sunday Night broadcasts before, just not in the broadcast booth. One of his favorite memories of Sunday Night Baseball came when he was with the Red Sox in 2001 when Mike Mussina was going for a perfect game with the Yankees and ESPN was trying out a new way to showcase the game.
“It was kind of a different game because they experimented with a home camera. It was the high home camera directly behind home plate, which gave you a different view of the game. That was one of the only games they used it. It’s a little bit different if you go back and see the highlights of that game.”
