There’s been a lot of discussion about what’s ahead for ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball broadcast this season (if there is, in fact, a MLB season) following Matt Vasgersian’s October exit. At that time, Andrew Marchand of The New York Post (who broke the news of Vasgersian’s exit) wrote that ESPN was “expected to keep” Alex Rodriguez on Sunday Night Baseball; Rodriguez had been the broadcast’s only analyst for the past two seasons following Jessica Mendoza’s shift to other ESPN roles, and had been working with Vasgersian and Mendoza on the broadcasts since 2018.  Now, though, Marchand writes that Rodriguez may wind up hosting an alternate feed somewhat analogous to the Monday Night Football alternate ManningCast, and that YES’ David Cone (seen above in a MSG interview in 2019) and current ESPN analyst Eduardo Pérez could wind up on the main booth alongside play-by-play voice Karl Ravech.

There are a couple of notable things with the Cone discussion. For one, as Marchand notes, Rodriguez reportedly pushed for Cone to join the SNB booth in 2020 when Mendoza was removed, and ESPN was reportedly in talks with Cone then. But they instead went with the two-man pairing of Vasgersian and Rodriguez. So it would certainly be interesting to have him come in and not pair with Rodriguez, but rather Pérez. And that’s also notable considering how Marchand also discusses ESPN’s declining baseball tonnage, with their new MLB deal (through 2028) no longer featuring a midweek package (which has not yet found another home, despite Barstool rumors), and the less analysts they need as a result. It would certainly be unusual for them to bring in an outside figure like Cone (who already has a job calling Yankees’ games for YES, and would likely keep that, and would need to figure out scheduling around that) at a time when they’re dialing down their MLB games overall.