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NBC Sports’ MLB Wild Card Coverage Offers a Blueprint for Better Baseball Broadcasts

· Yahoo Sports

For years, baseball has spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make the game feel younger, faster and more relevant. Pitch clocks. Bigger bases. New rules. More action. Maybe MLB should have looked in the broadcast booth, too.

I’ve been saying for years that baseball broadcasts need more energy. Younger voices and people who sound like they’re experiencing the game with us. As opposed to explaining it like we’re auditing an advanced statistics class. Watching NBC’s Wild Card coverage this week, I finally saw a version of a national baseball broadcast that felt different and better.

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During Cubs-Padres, Dave Flemming handled play-by-play alongside Jim Deshaies, who spent the season calling Cubs games. There was also Mark Grant, who spent the season calling Padres games. NBC then added Clayton Kershaw as its “Inside the Pitch” analyst on the field.

I loved it, and it left me wondering why this should disappear when the Wild Card round does.

Local Voices Matter

The concept isn’t completely new. NBC first experimented with team-specific analysts when Peacock launched MLB Sunday Leadoff in 2022. The idea was simple: Pair a national play-by-play voice with analysts who know the teams because they’ve been watching them every day. Peacock continued the approach in 2023, and NBC brought it back when baseball returned to the network this season.

For the Wild Card games, NBC featured a national play-by-play voice, an analyst from each participating team’s broadcast crew and an additional “Inside the Pitch” analyst. Phillies-Braves had John Kruk and C.J. Nitkowski, with Joey Votto providing additional analysis. White Sox-Astros had Steve Stone and Geoff Blum, with Adam Ottavino. Red Sox-Yankees had Lou Merloni and Joe Girardi, with Anthony Rizzo. Cubs-Padres gave us Deshaies and Grant, plus Kershaw.

That’s a lot of people. Normally, I’d say four voices on a baseball broadcast is about two voices too many. Except this worked.

The local analysts provide something national broadcasts too often lack: institutional knowledge. Grant doesn’t need a production meeting to learn the Padres. He has watched them since March. Deshaies knew the Cubs the same way. They know the bullpen patterns, personalities, slumps, and lineup changes. Moreover, all the little things that never make the national broadcast notes.

Then there was the future Hall of Famer, Kershaw.

I learned something listening to him. He could explain what a pitcher was trying to do. Why a pitch was selected. In addition, what was happening inside an at-bat in a way only someone who just finished an 18-year, Hall of Fame-level career can. He knew each hitter and pitcher and quickly explained their strengths, weaknesses and tendencies. Why? Because he competed against those players.

It doesn’t have to be a future Hall of Famer every time. Give me recently retired pitchers talking pitching and recently retired hitters talking hitting. Give me people close enough to the modern game that when they explain what a player is thinking, they remember what it feels like to be that player.

John Smoltz has been a major part of FOX Sports’ baseball coverage since 2014 and its lead game analyst since 2016. Ron Darling has been calling national postseason games for Turner since 2007. Both obviously know baseball and have earned their places in the booth.

Kershaw practically took off his cleats, grabbed a microphone and immediately gave viewers something different. Moreover, he was describing the modern game he had just finished playing.

Thinking Differently

This isn’t about pushing established analysts out. It’s about creating room for the next group to get in.

Baseball has been painfully slow to rethink the way it presents itself on television. The NFL gives us alternate broadcasts, ManningCasts and recently retired players and coaches constantly getting opportunities. The NBA has embraced personality. Baseball too often acts like changing the booth requires approval from Congress.

The strange part is that baseball may have the best collection of local broadcasters of any sport. They live with a team for six months and 162 games. Thus, fans develop relationships with them.

I live in the Bay Area, and Giants fans didn’t just listen to Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper describe baseball. Kruk and Kuip became part of the experience of being a Giants fan. Why wouldn’t you want some of that knowledge in October?

The frustrating part is that when the Wild Card round ends, so does NBC’s postseason coverage. Baseball moves deeper into October, but NBC’s idea doesn’t. That feels backwards.

I’m not suggesting baseball turn October into a broadcasting circus. We don’t need six people in the booth, a celebrity in the dugout and Kevin Hart explaining the pitch clock. Baseball just needs to recognize what NBC figured out.

The people who know these teams best are the people who have been watching them all year. Pair them with a strong national play-by-play voice, then add a recently retired player like Kershaw who can take viewers somewhere the traditional broadcast can’t.

It’s needed in a sport whose national broadcasts can sometimes feel like the baseball equivalent of the furniture at your grandparents’ house. It’s perfectly functional and been there forever. Nobody is quite sure why we’re still afraid to move it.

Baseball has changed. In addition, the players have changed. The way we watch and consume sports has changed. It’s time the people talking to us about it changed, too.

NBC gave us a glimpse of what that could look like this week. The best idea in baseball broadcasting this October shouldn’t disappear just because the Wild Card round did.

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I’m a humanitarian leader who’s all in on AI. Here’s why

· Fortune

AI can reinforce bias. It can hallucinate. It can expose sensitive information. It is used geopolitically in dangerous ways, with applications that make war easier and democracy harder. We are even now, more than ever, grappling with a conversation about AI’s existential risks. 

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So people are surprised when I tell them the International Rescue Committee, where I lead research and innovation, is building AI into how we serve people living amidst conflict and crisis. 

And after years of testing AI in refugee camps, conflict zones and disaster responses, I’ve reached a conclusion that surprises them even more: Humanitarian organizations shouldn’t only be among AI’s biggest skeptics. We should also be among its strongest advocates; its frontier users; and its most active learners. We need to be all in on AI. And we need to lead, not follow, on mitigating AI’s risks. 

Here’s why, and how. 

This moment demands invention… 

This is a terrible moment for humanitarian aid. There are more conflicts today than at any time since the Second World War, and climate disasters are accelerating. Almost 260 million people need assistance, including over 118 million forcibly displaced — a grim world record — while governments retreat from funding the response. Aid has contracted 25% since 2024. Clinics are closing, schools are shutting their doors, vaccines are not being delivered. Hundreds of thousands of entirely preventable deaths, if not millions, are expected between now and 2030.

That is the moral case for AI in humanitarian settings. It is also why we cannot afford to get it wrong. People in crisis have the least power to refuse a technology, contest its errors, or walk away from it. They should never be anyone’s test case. So the question was never whether AI could help, but what it takes to find out safely.

In our sector, the benchmark that matters is impact. Signpost, our digital information service, has reached 20 million people navigating the hardest moments of their lives, nearly 591,000 of them through one-to-one guidance from moderators, many displaced themselves. An AI mentor called aprendIA reaches teachers through WhatsApp, because that’s the technology they already have. In Nigeria it is on track to reach nearly a million children by the end of 2026 and 6.9 million by 2028, at an estimated $0.20 per child.

We’re piloting the use of AI and satellite imagery to find children who never appeared in  census records as conflict moves entire communities. If you don’t know where children are, you can’t vaccinate them. By adapting delivery routes as climate and conflict conditions change, the tool could cut cost per child by 25% while surfacing 10 to 20% more children. Pilots launch in Somalia next quarter.

Globally, 43 million children under five suffer acute malnutrition. Our simplified treatment programs work, and are 20% cheaper than the standard treatment mechanisms; but manual, error-prone data collection holds them back. So we’re testing photo-to-digital capture to replace hand transcription, flagging children who drop out of care, and reading rainfall and displacement signals to act before caseloads surge.

Again and again, AI, even with its flaws, has the potential to deliver, enabling us to reach more people in need, faster, for less. But what about its potential for harm? 

… it also demands proof

Humanitarians, like doctors, are guided by the principle “do no harm”. When mistakes can cost lives, “move fast and break things” isn’t a strategy. So we built a prototyping and evaluation capability whose job is not to launch AI but to break it first, creating a resource the whole organization draws on.

Here is what that looks like. 

Before Signpost’s AI assistant went near a client, we ran it for six months across Greece, Italy, El Salvador and Kenya while moderators and protection officers scored its answers against three standards: is it safe, is it client-centered, is it trauma-informed. The system improved substantially, as its pass rate climbed from 52% to 77%, and staff reported working about 70% faster. 

But it still failed roughly one answer in four.

So we did not deploy it on its own. Every response went through a human, and the most sensitive questions never reached the model at all. That is the part of responsible AI that doesn’t make headlines: sometimes the finding is that a tool isn’t good enough yet, and the discipline is to say so and stop. We publish those findings, failures included, because a sector that learns its lessons privately keeps repeating them.

The same discipline governs the rest of the work. We track guidance from data protection authorities and cybersecurity agencies, sit in peer networks where security professionals share emerging threats in real time, review use cases carefully, and revisit our own policies continuously, because what was sufficient a year ago may not be today. We design for the constraints we actually face — low bandwidth, old phones, dozens of languages — and build nothing a human can’t audit, override or switch off. AI cannot replace a caseworker with lived experience, and we aren’t trying to. The goal was never to replace people, but to let teams reach far more of them.

Responsible AI isn’t a slogan. It’s operational discipline. And because we work where the stakes are highest and the margin for error smallest, applications like ours could help set guardrails for the whole industry. We have stronger incentives than almost anyone to use AI carefully,  and to show our work.

Staying away would mean accepting that people living through war, displacement and climate disaster become the last to benefit from technologies everyone else enjoys. It would mean telling families whose aid has just been cut that we’re declining to explore tools that could change their lives — leaving “AI for good” on the table.

I don’t think that’s an ethical position.

The humanitarian sector has spent decades solving some of the hardest operational problems on Earth. If AI can help us solve them better — carefully with the right guardrails, transparently, and with evidence to prove it — we shouldn’t apologize for using it. We should insist on it.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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‘Appeasement Politics’: G Kishan Reddy Attacks Telangana Govt Over Dilsukhnagar Temple Incident - VIDEO

· Free Press Journal

Union Minister G Kishan Reddy on Friday launched a sharp attack on the Telangana Congress government over an alleged attempt to desecrate an idol at the Santoshi Mata Temple in Hyderabad's Dilsukhnagar, accusing the state government of failing to protect Hindu places of worship.

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Taking to X, Reddy said “attacks on temples, assaults on Hindu sentiments, and appeasement politics” had become commonplace in Telangana under Congress rule. He condemned the incident and alleged that the government had failed to act against a series of attacks on temples in the state.

“The attack on Santoshi Mata Temple in Dilsukhnagar is deeply condemnable,” Reddy said, adding that the alleged lack of action had raised concerns over the Congress government's approach to the protection of Hindu religious places and the law-and-order situation.

Reddy demands action from government

The Union Minister also referred to Chief Minister Revanth Reddy's alleged “Congress means Muslims, Muslims mean Congress” remark, saying it raised “serious concerns” over the government's policies.

Reddy demanded that the Telangana government take responsibility for what he described as a deteriorating law-and-order situation, apologise unconditionally to Hindus and initiate strict action against those responsible.

Man detained after temple incident

The remarks came after a man identified as Mohammed Ansari allegedly entered the Santoshi Mata Temple in Dilsukhnagar and attempted to desecrate the idol on Friday. According to police, the incident took place within the Chaitanyapuri police limits when devotees and the temple priest were present.

No Coal Shortage In India, Govt Boosts Supply To Power Plants Amid Rising Electricity Demand: G Kishan Reddy

The incident was captured on CCTV. Visuals circulating on social media purportedly show a man entering the temple, placing sticks or branches near the idol and subsequently leaving the premises while allegedly raising religious slogans.

Police detained Ansari following the incident. Authorities said he is undergoing mental-health treatment.

The incident has triggered concern among devotees and political reactions, with Reddy demanding accountability from the Congress government and calling for stringent action against the accused.

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