ESPN has decided to hire Major League Baseball Hall of Fame third baseman Chipper Jones of DeLand, Florida as its Wednesday evening analyst according to Jack Baer of Yahoo! Sports. Jones replaces David Ross, who was named the manager of the Chicago Cubs in the offseason.
Jones was in the ESPN broadcast booth in a guest role during the 2019 Major League Baseball regular season. In 2020, he will work alongside play-by-play man Boog Sciambi for 20 games according to Bruce Haring of Deadline.
In the brief time working together last year, Jones and Sciambi had some interesting conversations. ESPN is definitely moving toward the conversational platform, and encouraging its broadcasting teams to have a dialogue of interesting stories related to Major League Baseball when the game may lack interest at some point during the nine innings of action.
Jones was an eight-time All-Star with the Atlanta Braves. In 1999, Jones batted .319 with a career high 45 home runs and 25 stolen bases with 110 runs batted in, and at the end of the season was named the National League Most Valuable Player award winner. Ironically, that season was one year Jones was not an all-star. In 2008, Jones led Major League Baseball with a sensational .364 batting average and .470 on base percentage. Jones was also part of the Braves team that won the 1995 World Series.
It will be interesting to see what happens when Sciambi starts calling Chipper Jones “Larry”. In 1999, Jones disturbed Mets fans when he said, “Now all the Mets fans can go home and put their Yankees’ stuff on.” The Braves had just beaten the Mets in the National League Championship Series and were set to play the New York Yankees in the World Series. After Chipper Jones’s comments, it was common for Mets fans to holler “Larry” when playing at Shea Stadium and Citi Field.
