Sweeney Murti is set to begin a new chapter in his life. After being at WFAN for almost 30 years and covering the Yankees for the radio station the last 22 seasons, Murti starts a new role as a senior media contributor for MLB media.
Murti was a guest on the Sports Media with Richard Deitsch podcast on Monday and he talked about what his new role would be at MLB and how it gives him some room to be creative, which is different.
“I’m excited to kind of see where this goes. I worked for a traditional radio station for a very long period of time. What we put on the radio was very distinct and kind of in a straight line…This kind of has some room for creativity here.”
Murti told Deitsch about how the business has changed over the last 20+ years and that the information he would first give to WFAN is easily accessible now.
“It probably became less cost-effective to send me all over the country to cover games when you are able to get information in other sorts of fashion. I used to call Mike Francesa to give him the Yankees lineup everyday. Now the Yankees themselves are the first to post their lineup on Twitter. We were trying to find different ways to keep it relevant and matter whether it’s having podcasts or trying to find audiences for different things. We were all trying to do that. I just don’t think there’s an easy answer to this.”
Even though Murti was still able to do his job covering the Yankees, he was not on the road as much and it wasn’t easy for him to do the job.
For part of those 21 years on the Yankees beat, Murti covered Derek Jeter, who is now going to be doing work for FOX . Murti gave his expectation for how he thinks Jeter will do and he thinks it will be easy for the former captain to avoid controversy:
“I don’t think he is ever going to walk into controversy. If you saw The Captain, he has opinions and he wasn’t afraid to give them in that forum. Most of it was about him and the people around him. I’m a little curious how it is going to be with different teams. He never wanted to walk into controversy and was very astute in doing that. He’s a smart guy. He knows a lot about the game of baseball from the playing side and the business side.”
