Bob Costas has been making this argument for years, and the sport still hasn’t caught up to it.
Speaking with sports media YouTuber Brodie Brazil this week, Costas again argued that Major League Baseball should find a way to let fans hear their local broadcasters during postseason games. His example was Tom Hamilton, who has been calling Cleveland baseball for more than three decades and is widely considered one of the best local voices in the sport.
“If you put Tom Hamilton on a national broadcast and he got just as excited, it would sound weird,” Costas said. “But it’s perfect on its own terms.”
The way Hamilton sounds calling a Guardians game in July is a product of 162 games a year with the same audience, tuned to that team’s rhythms. A national broadcaster has to serve everyone watching, which means it sounds different by necessity, and fans who have spent a full season with their own guys will always feel that gap when October comes around.
What Costas is proposing isn’t an alternate feed, so much as it’s local voices calling the game over the network’s pictures, with the same commercials running on both, so the network isn’t losing revenue. He laid out the same framework in 2022 when Mike Francesa was ripping him during the ALDS, arguing then that the answer to the national-versus-local debate wasn’t to change how national broadcasts work but to give fans both options.
“They could put their voices in real time over the pictures the network is providing,” Costas said at the time. “And as long as the rating locally, which would be drained a little bit in both cities, as long as that could be added to the network’s rating, and as long as they played the same commercials so that the network wasn’t hurt in terms of revenue, that would be a reasonable alternative for people to have.” That was three years ago. He’s still saying it.
The demand has always been there. The complaints about national broadcasters during the playoffs are a fixture of October sports media, and the frustration doesn’t seem to be about any individual announcer other than John Smoltz. It’s about the format itself, about being handed a stranger’s voice for the most important games of the year after spending six months with the people who know your team like the back of their hand. NBC’s plan to use local analysts for Sunday Night Baseball this season — rotating team-specific voices into the booth depending on the matchup — feels like a partial nod to what Costas is suggesting, even if it’s a different model than what he’s describing.
Streaming platforms have experiemned it with it, too. Since 2023, Apple has allowed viewers on Friday Night Baseball to watch the national broadcast while listening to either team’s local radio feed as an alternate audio option. Meanwhile, Roku built its MLB Sunday Leadoff package — which has since reverted back to NBC — around local announcers and analysts from both teams, but that created its own set of problems.
In other words, the proof of concept exists. So does the appetite.
Even Michael Kay made the same argument during the 2024 playoffs, suggesting ESPN should offer a secondary audio feed so fans could hear their own announcers during the Wild Card round.
“This is what your team sounds like, and you want it to sound that way,” Costas concluded.
