With Lauren Shehadi at the center, TBS looks to recreate the ‘Inside the NBA’ magic for MLB (2024)

It was time to get a little loose.

For roughly seven hours, TBS had been blanketed by baseball coverage as part of its new Tuesday night MLB package. The pregame show had set up a doubleheader of games, with Rays-Yankees followed by Angels-Dodgers. Six hours of baseball later, viewers were back in the studio for the postgame show. For the next half hour, highlights were rolled, analysis was delivered and now the show was minutes from signing off.

That’s when analyst and former Phillies great Jimmy Rollins emerged from his seat behind the desk, the tools of his former trade in hand, and attempted to recreate a clip of White Sox slugger Jose Abreu juggling a baseball with his bat. One bounce, two bounces, three bounces, four … and then a stray shot that veered back toward the desk. A slow-motion replay captured the aftermath: Ducking out of the way, a stunned look on her face, was host Lauren Shehadi.

As the closing credits rolled, fellow analyst Pedro Martínez laughed: “We finally got her to flinch.”

For three months, Shehadi has been the center of gravity of the Tuesday night baseball package on TBS, the network’s first foray into prime-time, regular-season MLB programming. She hosts the pre and postgame shows — formally named “MLB: Leadoff” and “MLB: The Closer” — and it indeed takes an errant projectile to catch her off guard. She facilitates the discussion like a point guard, with a sixth sense of when and how to set up Rollins, Martínez and analyst Curtis Granderson. She wants the shows to be light on their feet.

So does Turner Sports, which paid more than $3 billion for the broadcast rights for the Tuesday night game as well as postseason contests for the next seven seasons. Fans come for the game, but the studio show is where a network makes its mark. “Your pre and post is always your signature,” says Craig Barry, executive vice president and chief content officer for Turner Sports. That’s why the network thought carefully about who should anchor its MLB show, testing out a variety of candidates before the season. Shehadi, who has hosted studio shows on MLB Network for the past decade, stood out.

“I don’t want to disrespect anybody else that was there,” Barry says, “but it was an easy decision.”

But making it look easy, as Shehadi does, is hard. Most studio shows are rigid, with talking heads confined to little boxes looking directly at the camera and delivering rehearsed takes that are timed out to the second. Turner Sports rejects that formula for something more naturalistic and free-flowing. Minus the potential head injury, that wayward baseball moment at the end of the postgame show two weeks ago was exactly the vibe TBS is looking for. It was spontaneous and unscripted and genuine. It was, well, like something you’d see on “Inside the NBA.”

That’s the grandaddy of Turner Sports’ studio shows, the longtime jewel of its NBA package and one of the great studio shows in sports television history. “Inside the NBA” can be so charmingly shaggy — Charles Barkley getting something off his chest, Shaquille O’Neal breaking brains and the internet with a discussion on saving money at the gas pump, and host Ernie Johnson and analyst Kenny Smith doing their best to keep it all on the rails — that attempting to recreate it would be a fool’s errand. Like Shohei Ohtani, it is unique. Copying it is impossible.

But there are qualities worth emulating. TBS doesn’t want an “Inside the NBA” clone, which would only come up short in comparison, but it does want a show that is good for the same reasons. It wants “Leadoff” and “The Closer” — they are essentially the same show with the same cast, just airing at different times — to be known for authenticity and insightful analysis. It wants the shows to be fun and unpredictable and personality-driven. It wants looseness and not rigidity. Fewer rehearsed takes delivered to the camera in exactly 30 seconds. More gut-level opinions spouted off the cuff.

More than anyone, it falls on Shehadi to get that feel right and, counterintuitively given the show’s relaxed aim, she’s as prepared as anyone to hit that bullseye. She’s a veteran of talking baseball, including as the anchor of the weekday morning show “MLB Central” on the league’s house network. She’s been a feature of TBS’s postseason coverage for several years as a sideline reporter, and now she’s in the host’s seat for a prime-time, nationally televised baseball show. “It’s my dream,” she says. A lifelong baseball nut, she gets to talk the sport with some of the greats.

And she wants to share it. After all, that’s what the show is all about. “We invite the viewer in for a conversation,” she says. “You can join it.” She wants you to feel like you’re there at that desk, dishing with the guys — like you’re being “spoken with” and not “spoken to,” Johnson says — all while keeping the dialogue nimble and entertaining and informative. It should feel informal and casual in a way that’s imperceptible, at least until you turn on a competing show that isn’t.

Or, as she puts it:

“I’m talking baseball with Curtis Granderson, Jimmy Rollins and Pedro Martínez. You want to hang?”

Back in April, Johnson was readying for another edition of “Inside the NBA” when he received a text from across the Treehouse, the name Turner Sports has given its studio space in Atlanta. It was from Shehadi, who was preparing for her first Tuesday night show. “I’m a little nervous,” it read. “Any advice?”

She certainly had come to the right person. Johnson has been the emcee of “Inside the NBA” for 30 years, during which time it has gone from being a run-of-the-mill basketball show to one that routinely transcends its ostensible subject matter and breaks into popular culture. But there can be more than one right person, and two of them were on this text exchange. “You’re the last person who needs to be nervous,” he replied. “You know what you do on MLB Central every morning? Do it at night on TBS.”

Indeed, Shehadi was as ready as anyone could be. Early on in life, she learned the value of being on top of her game. Growing up in the Washington, D.C., area as the youngest child of a Lebanese father and Italian mother, Shehadi was taught the importance of preparation and responsibility. That included on the softball field, where she played first base. Whenever a throw to first would squirt past her, no matter how many bounces it took along the way there, she’d look over to her father in the stands. He’d wink and say, “E3. You pick up your teammates.”

“There were so many valuable lessons there looking back,” Shehadi says, although she maintains that “some of those weren’t errors.”

The formative years of her broadcasting career taught her some of the same things. Her first on-camera interview was with then-University of Florida head coach Steve Spurrier for a student-run show called “Gatorzone.” An intimidating figure for any student journalist, Spurrier immediately put her on the defensive. “I said, ‘Hi coach!’ and he said, ‘Make it quick,’” she says. “I was shaking in my boots.” Maybe a life on camera wasn’t her calling, she thought at the time.

So, she settled for a life behind it. After graduation, she took her first full-time job as an overnight editor for a TV station in Sarasota, Fla. She was in charge of the lottery numbers, at least until she transposed a couple of digits and awarded the jackpot to the wrong person. It was worth only $250, but it felt like a grievous sin at the time. “I got yelled at and I remember thinking this TV business is not for me,” she says. “Everyone’s so intense.”

The high intensity was daunting, but Shehadi persevered. After the lottery incident, she turned back toward on-camera aspirations, following around the station’s sports director after her shifts and doing everything he did in order to get better. She made around 100 VHS tapes of herself in action, sending them out to stations across the country. When the only one that responded was in tiny Minot, N.D., she packed up her stuff and headed to the frozen north, where she spent the better part of the next two years. She made $9,000 a year, sometimes filling up her car $4 at a time. (Don’t get Shaq started on that.)

Ever since then, preparation has been a calling card. A gig at CBSSports.com followed her stint in North Dakota — she hosted an online fantasy football show for four years — but she truly reached the big-time when MLB Network put out a call for talent. She prepped for the tryout for three weeks. She studied every stadium and every player and even the names of their wives and children, far more information than she could possibly call upon for a 20-minute audition. She still has the notebook full of all that information in her desk.

Shehadi prepares smarter now, she says, but a lot of what makes her good at her job has little to do with factoids and rote memorization and more to do with feel. She has the same goal as a great umpire, to subtly move the action along and only take center stage when the circ*mstances truly demand it. Unless you were looking for it, you’d never pick up on her methods, like the way she leans toward the camera when she addresses the viewer and then leans back when she cedes the floor to her desk-mates.

“It’s just so natural to her,” says Barry.

Johnson has noticed it, too — “You can’t really teach the talent that she has,” he says — which is why Shehadi’s first-broadcast butterflies left him surprised. But only mildly. “Nobody, if they’re being honest, would say, ‘I felt comfortable the first time I sat down in that chair to host a show,’” he says. “No, you were scared to death and you were praying that nothing went wrong or that they wouldn’t roll the wrong highlight.” Or air the wrong lotto numbers. But at Turner Sports, excitement is found in the possibility that something will go awry. An expert host knows how to turn those mistakes — like a baseball buzzing your tower — into entertainment.

“Now, it’s like those are opportunities to have fun,” Johnson says. “She gets that.”

Good traffic cops are boring.

Sure, they get everyone home safely — “Everything is smooth and there are not fender benders,” Johnson says — but it wouldn’t make for riveting television. News stations don’t send choppers into the air to follow the orderly progression of vehicles through a four-way stop. So, comparing traffic cops to good TV hosts is “really an insult to good traffic cops,” Johnson thinks. On “Inside the NBA,” Johnson plays a little looser with right of way.

“I’m the rogue traffic cop who knows if I bring this up with Shaq, Chuck is going to broadside him,” he says. “And I can’t wait to see that happen.”

Through the first three months of its existence, the TBS baseball show isn’t quite as prone to pileups as its NBA cousin. It moves at a quicker pace and hasn’t yet devolved into spirited debates among the analysts, baseball-related or otherwise. It’s more buttoned-up, although certainly not all the way to the collar. “A big man’s Ding Dong Johnson. That’s not a baby’s Ding Dong Johnson,” Martínez crowed over a recent highlight of a Ronald Acuña Jr. home run,” using a favorite phrase that predates the show’s Tuesday incarnation. There’s even a “Ding Dong Johnson” logo that appears when he says it. You won’t see that on MLB Network or ESPN.

If the rest of the show isn’t as goofily risqué, it certainly isn’t staid and stale. There’s a method to ensuring the show, along with its basketball and hockey relatives on TNT, has a spontaneous feel. For one, Shehadi is invited to the production meetings ahead of each show, but the analysts are not. She and the network want their reactions to be genuine when subjects arise on the air. Just as important is her skill at drawing thoughts out of them they might consider mundane but the viewer would find fascinating.

Martínez, Rollins and Granderson are all baseball lifers and, because of that, Granderson says, “everything becomes normal and not as exciting to you.” Though she is a lifelong baseball fan, Shehadi brings the mindset of someone outside the game. She listens as her trio of analysts watch the night’s game, talking shop amongst themselves. If something grabs her attention — often a comment that the others, inured as they are to the intricacies of the game, don’t give a second thought — she’ll redirect their focus and, later, bring it up on the show.

Those subjects regularly provide the show with its juiciest meat. Granderson highlights a recent discussion about the efficacy of team meetings, spurred by the firing of manager Joe Maddon by the Angels. It’s a topic few outside the game really understand, Granderson has found, even his own family members. “We would lose a big game or be in a big stretch and I would see them after the game and they would always ask, ‘So, did you guys get yelled at?’” It doesn’t happen like that, Granderson would explain to them. After Maddon was fired, and at Shehadi’s prompting, he explained it again to a national audience.

The Treehouse, the studio space that houses the various Turner Sports shows, often provides some of the same outsider perspectives. Visiting it would be a sports fan’s dream. When baseball, hockey and basketball are in season at the same time, all-time greats from each can be found patrolling the hallways. And those greats regularly cross-pollinate, rapaciously peppering each other with questions about the other sports.

"I said switch!"

The #MLBonTBS crew giving the #InsideTheNBA guys buckets 😂 | @BRWalkoff pic.twitter.com/SBWDWc5Lcy

— NBA on TNT (@NBAonTNT) May 4, 2022

Martínez has asked Wayne Gretzky about avoiding fights on the ice. (The Great One’s secret: skating fast.) Barkley asked Martínez how he could be so intimidating despite being so small for a pitcher. O’Neal has bragged that he could take the three-time Cy Young Award winner deep. Each conversation hinges on an interloper’s innocence — “That’s a two-line pass!” Johnson remembers exclaiming while hanging out one night with the hockey analysts, who quickly informed him that nobody says that anymore — that reminds everyone of what the audience at home finds interesting.

.@SHAQ vs. @45PedroMartinez:

Who won? ⚾️ #MLBonTBS pic.twitter.com/mWLS032KAK

— B/R Walk-Off (@BRWalkoff) May 11, 2022

More often than not, though, it’s Shehadi who’s able to identify the intriguing among what her analysts might consider routine. Their off-air running dialogue during the games provides ample subject matter. She’ll interject the chatter with a question and “then all of a sudden, our focus changes,” says Granderson. “It’s still (insider) talk, but it’s answering the question our audience would love to hear.” On the broadcast, it’s common for her to tee up an analyst by referencing something that was said during a commercial break. “J-Roll, you were just saying …” she’ll start, sometimes even surprising them with her attentiveness. “She’s good at what she does,” Rollins says. “Nothing goes by that she doesn’t catch,” says Rollins.

Except, maybe, for that one misdirected baseball.

Eventually, after a post-basketball break, Johnson will join the fun on TBS. He’ll be the host the majority of Tuesday nights and Shehadi will be the host some and serve as an on-site reporter for others. In the postseason, Shehadi may shift back to her previous playoff role as a sideline reporter, or “she may stay in the studio,” Barry says. That has yet to be decided. “We don’t know,” says the executive. “We like her versatility.”

Whatever happens, it will hardly make a dent in her time on the airwaves. Shehadi still hosts “MLB Central” for three hours every weekday morning on MLB Network alongside Robert Flores and former infielder Mark DeRosa. That show is shot in Secaucus, N.J. and Shehadi flies into Atlanta each week for the show on TBS. In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, not long after each edition of “The Closer” has wrapped, she can be found at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, in sweatpants and her show makeup, studying for “MLB Central” as she awaits a flight back to the Big Apple.

“MLB Central” shares some of the DNA with what TBS wants to create Tuesday nights. “They’ll talk baseball and talk it intelligently but then there’s just as much time when they’re saying, ‘What’s your favorite candy?’ and then there’s a big debate about that,” says Johnson, a regular viewer. “It’s kind of like the way we do things.” If Shehadi considers the TBS show the apex of her career so far, it’s less because of the form and more because of the platform. “I talk about baseball before a national game of the week with the most brilliant baseball minds,” she says. She can think of little that’s better than that.

Can TBS recreate that “Inside the NBA” magic for baseball? That’s a question that will take much longer to answer. “Inside the NBA” has been around for three decades while TBS has had a prime-time baseball show for three months. But as guided by Shehadi, appealing ingredients are already evident.

It’s there when Martínez lets loose a Ding Dong Johnson and it’s there when Rollins drops the name of Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk, knowing the former pitcher’s eyes will widen in excitement. (“That’s one of my favorite players in baseball!” Martínez exclaims.) It’s there when Rollins admits to not running out every ground ball, saying, “Bobby Abreu, that’s your fault.” The show is more collegial than edgy — Shehadi teasing Rollins about eating too many donuts backstage, or asking viewers to direct all criticisms to Granderson on Twitter — but it’s a good hang.

And that’s the goal. It takes work to make it not feel like work, like a duck paddling furiously under the water. It’s the host who helps the show nimbly walk that line, and you never see Shehadi’s feet churning.

“There’s so many people who try so hard or they have to position themselves a certain way to be successful, and you can just tell that she’s so authentic and she’s so her, and that’s just the way she is,” Barry says. “Having that innate ability is really, really special.”

(Top photo: John Nowak / Turner Sports)