Thursday Night Baseball (otherwise known as MLB Network Showcase) is the title of a presentation of Major League Baseball on cable and satellite channel MLB Network (self-produced by MLB Network), that premiered on April 9, 2009. Longtime NBC Sports broadcaster Bob Costas is one of the play-by-play voices of the broadcasts. Matt Vasgersian also does play-by-play on some games. Al Leiter, Joe Magrane, Dan Plesac, Harold Reynolds, Mitch Williams and Jim Kaat provide color commentary. (Victor Rojas also did play-by-play during the 2009 season, but left the MLB Network to join the LA Angels broadcast team in 2010.) The new network produces 26 non-exclusive live games a year on Thursday nights. Since one or both teams' local TV rights holders also carry the games, the MLB Network feed is subject to local blackouts. In that event, the cities in the blacked-out markets will instead see a simulcast of another scheduled game via one team's local TV rights holder.
Famous quotes containing the words thursday, night and/or baseball:
“Newspaperman: That was a magnificent work. There were these mass columns of Apaches in their war paint and feather bonnets. And here was Thursday leading his men in that heroic charge.
Capt. York: Correct in every detail.
Newspaperman: He’s become almost a legend already. He’s the hero of every schoolboy in America.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive. . . .”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceiling one afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)