John Kruk will be in the booth Sunday night when the Phillies play the Atlanta Braves on Sunday Night Baseball, giving Philadelphia fans a familiar voice in a game that has been pulled into a larger television reshuffle. NBC has taken over the league’s Sunday-night package from this season under MLB’s new three-year media rights deals, and the Phillies-Braves game will air on Peacock and the relaunched NBCSN because NBC is carrying the first round of the NBA playoffs.
Kruk will work alongside NBC’s Sunday Night Baseball voice, Jason Benetti, and C.J. Nitkowski, who calls Braves games on BravesVision. NBC has opted against a permanent analyst and is instead using a rotating group of announcers tied to the teams on the field, a setup NBC Sports executive Sam Flood said last month is meant to show exactly what is going on inside each clubhouse, on the field and what matters most to those fans.
The assignment comes in a stretch when Philadelphia sports are being routed across different networks. Kruk is in his 10th season with NBC Sports Philadelphia, which aired the Flyers’ end to their six-season playoff drought on Monday night, when they beat the Carolina Hurricanes 3-2 in a shootout victory in overtime. NBC Sports Philadelphia will also carry the Flyers’ first-round playoff games against the Pittsburgh Penguins, though those games will also be shown nationally on or TNT.
The Sixers are next. They can clinch a spot in the NBA playoffs with a win in Wednesday night’s play-in game against the Orlando Magic, but that game will be on Amazon’s Prime Video, not on a regional sports network. That shift reflects the NBA’s new 11-year, $76 billion media rights deals, which have squeezed regional sports networks like NBC Sports Philadelphia out of broadcasting the league’s playoffs.
For Philadelphia viewers, the result is a week of familiar teams spread across unfamiliar platforms. NBC’s Sunday-night MLB experiment and the NBA’s new rights structure both point to the same reality: the old local-TV setup is fading, and the people most likely to notice are the ones who have followed these teams longest.
