With the start of the second half of the Major League Baseball season taking place over the weekend, ESPN presented a Sunday Night Baseball matchup between the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers. This rematch of the 2018 World Series included the traditional broadcast on ESPN featuring Karl Ravech, Eduardo Pérez, David Cone and Buster Olney, along with the debut of a new viewing functionality.
The new version of the Statcast-driven alternate broadcast debuted on ESPN2 featuring Kevin Brown, Mike Petriello and Trevor May, implementing innovations in technology and data analysis to bring fans an informative and entertaining product. Both broadcasts of Sunday Night Baseball, which ended in a 9-6 victory for the Dodgers, combined to average 1.62 million viewers on Sunday night. The broadcast was up 11% compared to the Boston Red Sox game against the New York Mets last year on the same weekend.
The broadcast featured a mic’d up interview with Red Sox rookie outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela, who is having a strong rookie season and could be up for consideration to win the American League Rookie of the Year award. Moreover, the game featured a 473-foot blast by Shohei Ohtani that cleared the outfield bleachers at Dodger Stadium, the longest home run hit at the ballpark since 2015. This feat of took place as the traditional broadcast was speaking with Clayton Kershaw, who affirmed that he had never seen a baseball hit that far before at the ballpark.
The Statcast alternate broadcast aired live on ESPN2 from ESPN’s Seaport District Studios, the same location from which Sunday Night Baseball with KayRod was filmed. This presentation of the game averaged 176,000 viewers, representing an 11% share of the overall Sunday Night Baseball audience. During the two years in which the KayRod broadcast was presented, it accumulated an average of 9% of the aggregate Sunday Night Baseball audience. The network had previously aired Statcast-driven alternate broadcasts but deviated from these presentations following the 2021 season, the T-Mobile Home Run Derby notwithstanding.
