Zac Brown Band to open NBC’s Sunday Night Baseball
On Sunday night, NBC’s “Sunday Night Baseball” will roll out with a familiar name attached — the Zac Brown Band.
The three-time Grammy Award-winning Southern rock group is set to star in the opening for NBC’s Major League Baseball coverage when the Atlanta Braves host the Cleveland Guardians in the first “Sunday Night Baseball” game on NBC.
“It’s humbling, honestly, to have our band’s name mentioned in the same breath as theirs in this context means a lot,” Zac Brown said in an email to The Associated Press. “We’ve spent many years just trying to make music that connects with people, and something like this tells you that it’s reaching further than you ever imagined.”
Brown’s role here isn’t just a headline moment. The band is also singing a reimagined version of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression Part 2.” NBC Sports creative director Tripp Dixon said the choice landed because the track includes an organ, and because the first line — “Welcome back, my friends to the show that never ends” — fits the tone NBC is chasing. “The majors has often been referred to as ‘The Show,’” Dixon said. “Those were the two elements we felt like, holy cow, that sounds like something to build this idea around.” Still, the timing matters, too. All three “Sunday Night” openings carry the theme of “waiting all day for Sunday night.”
If this is starting to look like a pattern, it’s because it already is. Underwood has done the “Sunday Night Football” opening since 2013, using a reimagined take on Joan Jett’s 1988 song “I Hate Myself for Loving You.” Lenny Kravitz’s “Sunday Night Basketball” opening uses Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation,” which came out in 1968. Now, Sunday Night Baseball is getting its own entry point.
That opening segment was shot in Milwaukee last month. NBC also teased it with a couple of seconds during the network’s opening night broadcast between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers. Brown looked back on the process with a little disbelief. “It was one of those experiences where you step back and think, how did we get here?” he said. “We put everything we had into the performance and then watching it come together with the visuals, the production, it took on a whole new life. The folks at NBC Sports really understood the energy we were going for. It felt like a genuine collaboration, and when I finally saw the finished product, I was really proud.”
Behind the scenes, the NFL-adjacent feel is also tied to the business. Major League Baseball and NBC agreed in November to a three-year deal for Sunday night games and the wild-card round of the playoffs. After Sunday’s game, the next six weeks will be on Peacock and NBCSN before NBC takes over from May 31 through Sept. 6. What really stands out is how much the music rollout is treated like part of the broadcast itself, not an add-on.
And for Brown, there’s a personal layer to all of it. The Braves game is in Georgia — at least for the fans watching, and for the artist watching too. Brown grew up in Georgia and followed the Braves. “Man, that is not lost on me at all. I’m a Georgia boy through and through, so having this debut on a night when the Braves are playing, that’s the kind of thing you just can’t script,” Brown said. “Our fans know how much Atlanta means to us. To have this moment tied to our team, in our home state, it really does make it feel full circle.”