How ESPN picks its Sunday Night Baseball anthem

The pitch clock isn’t the only thing new to baseball this season.

ESPN chooses a new anthem to use in its promotions of Sunday Night Baseball each year, and this time, it’s a spin on a classic: Flo Rida’s “What a Night,” a take on “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)” by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons.

If the song sounds familiar (aside from its similarities to “Oh, What a Night”), that’s because it’s already running in live games as well as in weekly marketing content like TV and radio spots and social media posts promoting Sunday Night Baseball.

ESPN, which has exclusive rights to Sunday Night Baseball as part of a $4 billion deal with Major League Baseball, has selected a new anthem every year since 2020. The anthem serves as ESPN’s way to “give more access points for people to connect into the baseball story,” Emeka Ofodile, the company’s VP of sports marketing, told Marketing Brew.

Batting lineup: “Way Less Sad,” by indie pop trio AJR, served as Sunday Night Baseball’s anthem for the first half of the 2021 season, perhaps a fitting choice for the year following Covid lockdowns. A year later, ESPN selected “Sunday” by indie singer-songwriter Ben Rector, likely for obvious reasons.

The tradition of picking a song to represent each season began in 2020, when ESPN deployed its “Give Us Baseball” creative platform as a way of marketing baseball with a more “fan-centric” approach, Ofodile said. To pick the song of the season, the marketing team works with ESPN’s music directors and creative studio, as well as record labels, to choose a tune that encapsulates “what we want spring and summer” and “this new era” of baseball to feel like, Ofodile said.

Something old, something new: Flo Rida’s “What a Night” marks a departure from indie artists, but all three songs are unified by similar vibes, Ofodile told us.

Each year, the marketing team has tried to identify songs that are “upbeat,” “joyful,” and “family-friendly,” he said, and “What a Night” checks all those boxes. Plus, the song feels both nostalgic and modern, serving as a nod both to baseball’s history and the recent efforts to modernize the sport.

“It’s almost like the perfect metaphor for what’s happening in baseball right now,” Ofodile said. Though the song resonates with older generations, he added, “the modern take on it also connects with younger generations.”