It was all the more serendipitous that during a week where the world celebrates resurrection baseball fans were able to celebrate one of their own. We got our first whiff of it on Wednesday courtesy of AWFUL ANNOUNCING’s Sam Neumann:
This Week in Baseball is coming back. MLB announced Wednesday that it’s reviving the iconic TWIB franchise as a short-form weekly series, with new episodes dropping every Friday at noon ET on the @MLB account on X starting April 3. The series will run through the 2026 postseason and is being produced by MLB Studios and MLB Network. The new version — hosted by multimedia content creator Kait Maniscalco — is built around a shorter format designed for social media, but MLB says it will retain the elements that made the original memorable alongside highlights from the previous week, player profiles, historical flashbacks, and bloopers.
And although it’s clearly aimed at a generation that tends to eschew long-form video of any sort that I can’t even fake being a part of, the fact that it is choosing to revive those elements brought me back to a time when I was in that age cohort myself, and hence into a tent I otherwise would eschew. I mean, there’s not a lot worth signing into X these days otherwise for a sizable portion of us, is there?
But yep, I was there, just as I was back 49 springs ago, and pretty much every week during baseball season after that for a number of years. And indeed it had the same opening that got me hooked in the first place. And I know just about every game show geek regardless of generation will recognize when TWIB’s iconic theme was first heard.
Yep, I got as excited for the resurrection of the theme to the late, lamented New York-based Roman candle called JACKPOT! as I did the idea for a weekly show dedicated to baseball highlights. But another throwback that the OG producers included got my dad into the tent. That theme was narrated by none other than Mel Allen, at that point years removed from his glory days as the de facto voice of the game, unceremoniously fired by the New York Yankees as their play-by-play announcer just as their glory era of 15 pennants in 18 years was coming to an end, a stint at the time which guaranteed him national exposure on each year’s national World Series telecasts. My dad loved Allen, proudly Jewish despite his Alabama roots, and that made him popular even in boyhood houses like his that adored the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was my first extended exposure to Allen, as it was for many others of my generation. And that connection allowed him a joyous second act that eventually returned him to the Yankees as not only the voice of its Old Timers Day festivities but also as one of the team’s first announcers for its cable TV broadcasts, where he happened to be at the mike for a Dave Righetti no-hitter on a steamy July 4th in 1983 that yours truly nearly wound up going to had I not been talked into going to the beach with my cheap friend instead.
It’s that sort of multigenerational appeal that clearly is in place with this new version. Allen’s signature comments that accompanied the highlight packages are liberally interspersed as needledrops to Mainscalco’s current-day details–because while the player and the uniform style might change the amazing defensive effort or the embarassing blooper that caused them then happen today as well, making those scripted interjections as timeless as ever.
And this sort of attention to detail appearently touched Neumann’s colleague Philip Michaels as deeply as it did me, as evidenced by the happy memories he shared when he posted the first episode to his readers on Friday:
(T)he things from our childhood tend to stick with us, and that’s true of This Week in Baseball, which was very much appointment viewing for me back in the early 1980s. It’s fun to see players I grew up watching like Dale Murphy, Mike Schmidt, and Rickey Henderson still in their prime, with their feats taking place on a big-screen TV instead of in my mind’s eye. It’s also a blast to see footage of old stadiums and uniforms, though I’d suggest averting your eyes any time footage from a Chicago White Sox game of the 1970s appears in an episode.
The fact that all of these throwbacks are part of the new version will undoubtedly open doors for dads (granddads?) to reconnect with their childhoods as my dad (and others’) did with theirs when the original TWIB signaled it was time to settle in for a summer afternoon escape. Sure, there’s now plenty of other ways to see baseball highlights now than there were then. Michaels allowed one of the OG version’s architechts to remind us all about that:
“This is before satellite, before ESPN,” (Geoff) Belinfante (a producer on the original series), said. “So there was really no way that anybody could see highlights from anything other than their hometown teams. So This Week in Baseball went on the air in June of ‘77, it was like a revelation, because all of a sudden, baseball fans could see what was going on in games around the league that they could only read about in their local newspapers and their little box scores.”
Heck, just go the landing page @mlb on x. You’ll see a host of clips from mere hours earlier–heck, if you happen to do that while games are in progress you can get those clips minutes after they happen. But you won’t quite get it in the unique package that MLB put together–not now, not then. And you certainly won’t get the music. Belinfante’s the guy to thank–or blame–for that, too. As he further shared with Michaels:
(N)either song — the opening “Jet Set” number or “Gathering Crowds” that closed out each episode — was written specifically for This Week in Baseball. Both were selections of stock music that Belinfante helped pick out during a typically late night, getting the show ready for its premiere. “If I did anything right in my career, I guess I did that, because people still call me to this day and want to know where they can find [the music],” Belinfante said.
You sure did well, Geoff. And c’mon, just between us–you probably watched JACKPOT!. too.
Until next time…