Matt Vasgersian ‘intrigued’ with ESPN’s new ‘Sunday Night Baseball’ booth

Matt Vasgersian said he is “intrigued,” which puts him in line with most of the baseball and television worlds regarding ESPN’s new “Sunday Night Baseball” booth.

What makes Vasgersian different than the rest of us is that he is a member of that booth, as play-by-play announcer alongside analysts Jessica Mendoza and Alex Rodriguez, a trio that will debut Thursday on ESPN2 for a Yankees-Twins spring training game.

How will it go? No one is quite sure. Hence the aforementioned intrigue.

“When there’s a new incarnation of a booth like this the reality, and we’re aware of it, is that a lot of people are going to be just listening for mistakes instead of watching the game,” Vasgersian said. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to try to do anything differently, but I guess just having a little bit of a thicker skin might be a step in the right direction.

“We’re not going to be as cohesive on March 29 [Opening Day] as we hope to be in mid-June. It’s just the reality of it. But people will be listening because they want to see what it’s going to be like early.”

This is the first milestone in what will be a 2018 of change for two of ESPN’s flagship franchises. Mendoza will be the only person in either the “Sunday Night Baseball” or “Monday Night Football” booths who will be back from 2017.

Mendoza saw Dan Shulman step aside of his own volition and Aaron Boone leave to become the Yankees’ manager. Enter Vasgersian, a familiar voice from Fox and MLB Network, and Rodriguez, who has starred as a Fox studio analyst since 2015. (He will continue to work with Fox in the postseason.)

“I know what it’s like to have that initial push of PR and hype,” said Vasgersian, who did play-by-play for the XFL in 2001. “Sometimes it leads to bringing more eyeballs to you that ordinarily wouldn’t watch. Sometimes it just leads to disappointment, because people are expecting so much.

“We’re going to do the best we can and have fun. This is what I do, and I love it. Alex and Jessica love it, too . . . I’m a baseball geek. Alex is a baseball geek, which is weird as a guy who’s accomplished just about everything in the game that one could. By that standard, we’re going to have a good time, at least. At the very worst, we’re going to have a good time.”

Vasgersian said the goal is to keep things casual and genuine – “The more honesty, the more transparency, the better” — without trying to reinvent the wheel.

“While you want to convey a more casual relationship with booth-mates and with the viewers,” he said, “you still have to service it professionally, because there is a large segment of the audience that wants it to sound a certain way. They want their baseball game to sound a certain way, so to completely blow it up isn’t what we’re after.

“We just want to find our stride sooner rather than later and have it sound organic and natural, like it’s three friends at a ballgame.”

Vasgersian has known Mendoza since she was an Olympic gold medal softball player in 2004, and he later advocated getting her on the air at ESPN and MLB Network.

“She kind of popped off the page then in terms of a personality,” he said of her playing days. “Her passion is great. She wants to be good and she spends a lot of time on this.”

Vasgersian added, “The weird part for me is I really enjoyed her with Boonie and Dan. I feel a little like I’m almost changing something I liked now by virtue of being involved in it. I hope we can be as good, because I thought the three of them were great to listen to.”

Even as a pioneer among women sports broadcasters, Mendoza is the known quantity after two full seasons in the Sunday night booth. The wild card is Rodriguez, who has worked some games but has far more studio experience.

Vasgersian is optimistic.

“[Rodriguez] just wants to drink everything in,” he said. “He’s interested in what people think. He’s interested in being critiqued and he wants to get better, so the fact that he hit the ground running as a TV personality didn’t really come as shock because I knew he put a lot of thought and preparation into it.

“The difference is now, and Alex is very aware of this, there is a huge difference between three-plus hours of live game broadcast and studio commentary pre- and postgame. That’s kind of what he’s focusing on now. It’s a new thing for him to learn and I’m positive he’ll be good at that, too.”

For Vasgersian, who has had many prominent assignments, including baseball playoff series for Fox, the Sunday night booth is a leap into an even higher level of visibility.

“I consulted a number of people about this, because it did represent a pretty big change for me, personally and professionally,” he said. “I was curious. I wanted to take everybody’s temperature, from people at the league, people in broadcast, and the same message kept coming back: There are only a handful of kind of jewel properties within every sport and this is one of them.

“There is the All-Star Game, there is the World Series, that No. 1 chair at Fox that Joe Buck has anchored wonderfully for a long time . . . But outside of that, this is it. It’s those two things, and it’s pretty cool to have one of those chairs.”

By Neil Best

neil.best@newsday.com@sportswatch

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.