MLB Tonight Is the New Baseball Tonight

Next Big Thing is MLB FanHouse's look at emerging teams, trends and stars in 2009.

As a baseball fan, I don't really ask a lot from my nightly highlight show. Mainly, I want highlights. That seems like a simple request, so maybe I should expand it. I want highlights of everything. Not just division leaders, not just big markets, not just relevant games. I want to see that Mariners-Royals highlight just as much as the Yankees and Red Sox.

Beyond highlights, I just want enough analysis to make me think. What happened during this game that I NEED to know about? Why did it happen? I watch plenty of baseball and I played through high school, but most of the analysts of these shows are guys that cover baseball professionally or played professionally. It shouldn't be hard to provide a little bit of insight into everything that happens on the field for these guys.

The show to get all these things used to be ESPN's Baseball Tonight. They had Peter Gammons, Harold Reynolds, Buster Olney, Tim Kurkijan, Jayson Stark ... I could go on forever. Somewhere along the lines, though, they've lost their way. They brought in Steve Phillips, which is just as bad as NBC bringing Matt Millen in as a studio analyst for football games. They brought in John Kruk to be a blustery personality. Phillips and Kruk now dominate the show, making illogical arguments fed to them by producers in an attempt to generate discussion. There are fewer highlights and less observation-based analysis with more of John Kruk talking about why the Pirates will go to the playoffs and Steve Phillips discussing what other GMs should do. And somehow, this is supposed to enhance our baseball knowledge.

Enter MLB Tonight. Once the season starts, it's running on the MLB Network every night from 6 PM until the last game ends. Since it's run by Major League Baseball, the MLB Network has cameras in every stadium. That means they can offer live look-ins for every game each night during the show. They brought in Reynolds, who was fired from ESPN in 2006, and Al Leiter, who I think might be one of the most insightful baseball commentators out there, along with Matt Vasgersian and others to build a solid studio of on-air talent.

Some of the guys in the studio can be a little grating at time (that's you, Jon Heyman) and some of the commentary veers towards Joe Morgan-territory from time to time, but the three-way debates between Reynolds, Leiter, and Joe Magrane during their off-season version of MLB Tonight, Hot Stove, have been constantly interesting and actually thought provoking. I don't think anyone's ever accused Steve Phillips of being thought provoking.

I don't mean for this to sound like a commercial for the MLB Network. Baseball Tonight still has the best reporters in the business in guys like Olney and Gammons, and Jon "I only report Scott Boras news, guess who's got the top spot on my speed dial" Heyman and Tom Verducci just don't measure up right now. Still, live look-ins? Running all night? With only baseball highlights? And no Steve Phillips or John Kruk? I think I know where my highlights are coming from this year.