Struggling Phillies land more games on ESPN, YouTube

Despite being 6½ games behind the Atlanta Braves in the National League East, the struggling Phillies will be the beneficiaries of some national exposure in their upcoming series against the San Francisco Giants.

On Thursday, Aug. 8, the first game of the Phillies’ series against the Giants at Oracle Park will air exclusively on YouTube at 9:45 p.m. as part of a new deal this season between Google and Major League Baseball. It will be the Phillies’ second appearance on YouTube this season; earlier this month, the team’s 7-6 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers drew “more than 200,000 concurrent viewers at its peak,” according to Google.

The game appeared to stream well on mobile, but some desktop viewers faced repeated interruptions due to an unspecified error.

» READ MORE: Mandate for Phillies GM Matt Klentak: Add a rotation arm before the trade deadline | Bob Brookover

ESPN will then feature the Phillies-Giants on Sunday Night Baseball on Aug. 11 at 7 p.m. While ESPN’s baseball broadcast has high production value, the network has been dinged by sports media pundits and fans for focusing too much on broadcasters Alex Rodriguez, Jessica Mendoza, and Matt Vasgersian, and not enough on the games themselves.

“Everyone in the stadium and watching on TV will most definitely know A-Rod and ESPN are doing the game. This has long been the issue with ESPN game broadcasts at their worst — you really know they are doing the game,” New York Post sports media columnist Andrew Marchand wrote last month.

ESPN kicked off its Sunday Night Baseball coverage in April with Braves-Phillies at Citizens Bank Park, where both Vasgersian and Rodriguez were raked over the coals for attempting to sound like Philadelphians while eating cheesesteaks.

During Sunday’s broadcast of the New York Yankees’ 9-6 win over the Boston Red Sox, Rodriguez’s fiancée, actress and singer Jennifer Lopez, presented him with a cake celebrating his 44th birthday (which was actually Saturday). But as reporters pointed out following the game, the cake was left uneaten in the press box.

NBC’s Peter King stopped by the NovaCare Complex on Saturday to observe the Eagles’ third practice of training camp (here are some observations from day one and day two) and spent time talking to quarterback Carson Wentz and head coach Doug Pederson (who admitted his sweet-tooth led him to some late-night refrigerator raiding).

In a video for NBC Sports, King said his biggest takeaway from the hot, early-morning practice was how upbeat and positive the team felt, including Wentz.

“It was like pulling teeth. He was king-of sullen, not happy. Not impolite, but just no happy,” King said of talking to Wentz during training camp last year. “Today, I felt like I was talking to Gene Kelly or one of the happiest guys on Earth.”

Watch:

The Eagles were off on Sunday, but returned to practice Monday morning. Follow my colleagues Jeff McLane, Les Bowen, and Paul Domowitch for complete coverage, and make sure to bookmark inquirer.com/eagles.

• Former Eagles quarterback Mark Sanchez made his debut as an ESPN college football analyst last week as part ESPNU’s coverage of Pac-12′s media day (which also featured former Eagles head coach Chip Kelly, who is entering his second year at UCLA.)

Sanchez will spend his first year at ESPN as a studio analyst, replacing Mack Brown (who left to coach North Carolina) on ABC’s Saturday coverage alongside Temple grad Kevin Negandhi and former New York Jets defender Jonathan Vilma. Sanchez will also appear on a variety of ESPN shows, including SportsCenter and Get Up!.

• The Olympics are a little less than a year away, but details of NBC’s coverage plans are beginning to trickle out. One nugget: NBC Olympics president Gary Zenkel confirmed to my colleague Jonathan Tannenwald that you’ll have to have a cable subscription if you want to stream the Games online (though Twitter will stream a portion of NBC’s prime-time coverage).

• 94.1 WIP producer Ben Livingston’s last day at the station is today. He most recently produced the afternoon show hosted by Jon Marks and Ike Reese (which topped 97.5 Mike Missanelli in the ratings for the second-straight quarter). Livingston is leaving Philadelphia and heading up I-95 to Columbia University, where he’ll start in the fall as an engineering master’s student.