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Mike Tirico has never called a Major League Baseball game. That’s his white whale, the ever-elusive event he’s never been able to check off the bucket list, despite calling everything else under the sun. And it probably won’t happen at NBC, not because the voice of Sunday Night Football isn’t capable, but because the network already has a stable of announcers, including Jason Benetti, Matt Vasgersian, and Dave Flemming. Earlier this year, NBC said Tirico wouldn’t be involved in Sunday Night Baseball, citing his insanely busy schedule. After all, he does pretty much everything else for the network, so he probably deserves at least a little bit of a break before the NFL starts up again. And part of that break apparently means joining Jason Benetti and Dan Petry in the Detroit Tigers’ broadcast booth, catching a game at Comerica Park as the season ticket holder he’s been since the ballpark opened in 2000. This was more of a cameo than the couple of innings he told The Detroit News he’d love to call someday. So no, we didn’t get Tirico calling balls and strikes and dropping the kind of meticulous, deep-cut factoids about Kevin McGonigle and Hao-Yu Lee that come from his obsessive studying, but he did get mic’d up for a few minutes to talk Tigers fandom with Benetti and Petry. You truly never know who will join us in the booth and tonight it’s @miketirico! pic.twitter.com/NmWWudfs6P — Detroit SportsNet (@WatchDSN) August 25, 2026 “I saw you were doing the Tigers on Friday, the Lions on Saturday,” the Michigan resident told the voice of the Detroit Tigers during his brief cameo. “Did you do the Red Sox [on Sunday]? So, I was worried that you weren’t going to make it back, so they had me on standby tonight. I was in the parking lot at 2:30 going, what is Framber’s [Valdez] average against second, third time through the order… I was on standby, and the second you showed up, I sat downstairs and had a beer.” Was that actually the case? Well, we know Tirico was at the ballpark, since he and his wife have been season ticket holders since the park’s inception. But being that he and Benetti are two of the busiest sports media members outside of Kirk Herbstreit and Pat McAfee, he was likely just ribbing his colleague about the sheer volume of jobs Benetti juggles across NBC and the Tigers. Anyway, we can have fun imagining Tirico calling a game. Or maybe we don’t have to imagine. “At some point while we’re all doing this, and Dan Dickerson comes in and does TV,” Benetti said, “but if Dan’s off one day and I miss a game, would you come do play-by-play?” “This is the one sport I haven’t done,” Tirico replied. “It would be the honor of my life. And if I have to be honest, at home at night, after about the fifth inning — this is around the time I turn your sound down, and I just call the game for anybody in the house. I just try to do the Benetti straight man, good jokes.” The Benetti straight-man jokes are part of what helped the Tigers’ booth land near the top of Awful Announcing’s 2026 MLB local broadcaster rankings. But hey, if we get Tirico in there for a few days each summer to keep his pipes sharp for football season, who knows where the Tigers could rank in 2027, assuming there’s still a season by then. Tirico could always go call a game for the Savannah Bananas, but that’s probably not scratching his actual baseball itch. As he prepares for the start of the 2026 NFL season, opening with a Wednesday night matinee and a rematch of the Super Bowl he called alongside Cris Collinsworth just six months ago, Tirico mused on watching the Tigers all spring and summer, listening to Dan Dickerson call games on the radio (make sure to vote!) the flipping through the rulebook to make sense of Red Sox-Blue Jays’ confusing run-rule finish, the dirt from old Tiger Stadium mixed into the foundation of his home in Ann Arbor, and getting to stand in the back of the press box as a kid and watch Ernie Harwell call the final three outs of a game. He gave Petry and Benetti their flowers too, particularly Benetti, who’s now calling national NBA games for their shared network. “Because I don’t cover baseball, it’s the one place I can still have fandom, and I do enjoy baseball a lot,” Tirico told the Detroit News. “I love listening to Dan Dickerson, Jason Benetti, all the people who’ve come before. Even when my wife and I moved here, Ernie [Harwell] was still going.” While a full-time role for Tirico on Sunday Night Baseball is probably never going to happen, it would be a shock if he didn’t cross an MLB game off his bucket list, especially given his one-off NHL broadcast for NBC back in 2019.