There are maybe two things that everyone in Boston can agree upon and they are: a) Go Sox and b) Benedict Cumberbatch’s accent in Black Mass was fahkin awful. In the most parochial place that ever was or ever will be, authenticity functions as a means of psychic gatekeeping, and someone who doesn’t speak the lingua Francona isn’t someone who’s worth listening to when the game’s on.
Regional accents are being slowly genericized into a sort of gloppy Americanese, but Massachusetts will surrender its non-rhoticity the day they bulldoze the last Cumby’s, which is to say: Never gonna happen. Outsiders are to be viewed with skepticism, if not outright contempt, and while there are no shortcuts to legitimacy, a shared dialect goes a long way toward boosting the credibility of the people who talk about the hometown team for a living.
NESN CEO David Wisnia gets that, even if he’s a transplant from Los Angeles. (Whatever. Jeremy Renner’s from Modesto or someplace like that and his accent in The Town is unimpeachable.) Since taking the reins at the RSN in October 2024, Wisnia has done his bit to boost in-game deliveries—the Red Sox closed out last season up 46% in average household ratings—while spearheading an efficiency review that gave way to the relaunch of NESN’s direct-to-consumer service.
While Wisnia took on the role as the RSN model seemed poised to collapse into the Charles River, NESN continues to flourish under his leadership. And he never stops looking for ways to make the on-screen product really pop. It’s largely escaped detection outside the 617 area code, but NESN has stealthily developed arguably the most homegrown MLB crew on TV, so much so that just about everyone who covers the Sox was brought up within a 150-mile radius of Fenway Park.
If it probably goes without saying that the Jerry Remy-Dennis Eckersley battery was NESN’s gold standard (right up there with WSBK-TV’s classic Sean McDonough-Bob Montgomery booth), the RSN has found a winning combination in play-by-play voice Dave O’Brien and a rotating cast of color analysts that includes Lou Merloni, Will Middlebrooks and Kevin Millar. O’Brien’s a Quincy guy (unless you’re referring to Jack Klugman, that’s “Quin-zee”), Merloni hails from Framingham, and Texas-born Middlebrooks gets a pass because he won a ring with the Sox in 2013.
The studio is also crammed with locals, as Milton’s Rich Hill and Hyde Park’s Manny Delcarmen keep things lively alongside fellow former Sox hurler Jonathan Papelbon, while Worcester product J.P. Ricciardi’s career has taken him from the front office (Jays/Mets/Giants) to the analyst’s chair. NESN’s latest hire is Bethel, CT’s Matt Barnes, aka Matty Backpacks, winner of Game 1 of the 2018 World Series.
As Wisnia sees it, stacking the deck with Bay Staters is a means toward reinforcing the bond between the fan and the franchise. “We’ve been very intentional in our approach to local,” Wisnia said in a recent phone interview. “These are voices who grew up with this team in their living rooms, and our viewers have responded to that. We’ve put a tremendous amount of resources and made a strategic bet on connection and deep storytelling; at a time when national broadcasts are increasingly homogenized, NESN continues to build something unique.”
Given that an abiding love for the Sox is not so much shared as it is hardwired into one’s genetic code, Wisnia says there’s “comfort in hearing these voices and seeing these faces on our air … and that local perspective, that lived experience, that cultural fluency becomes a competitive advantage for us. It provides a distinction that is becoming increasingly important, especially as media consumption continues to fragment.”
Just as every Bostonian zooming east on the Mass Pike knows he’s home as soon as the Pru looms into view, Wisnia believes the familiar carries a positive charge, one that is almost infectiously transferrable. “There’s a fondness, there’s a warmness,” Wisnia said. “When people tune into NESN, they’re getting a taste of home cooking that isn’t replicable anywhere else. And that is really significant when the fan base in question is as passionate as they are here.”
Wisnia doesn’t brush off concerns about the endemic pressures that continue to harry the RSN model—at the close of the first quarter, penetration of the legacy pay-TV bundle had fallen to just 32% of U.S. TV homes, down from a peak of 91%—but the decisions he’s made since moving into the top job at NESN have gone a long way toward subverting the paradigm. Even in the face of Comcast’s subscriber-winnowing move to shift NESN to its pricier service tier, the network’s ratings continue to grow.
As is the case with YES Network in the New York market, NESN is typically the highest-rated channel on the dial in the Boston DMA whenever the Sox and Bruins are suited up.
“In no way can you discount the challenges, but this is still a strong, reliable business with significant cash flow,” Wisnia said. “Obviously we’re going to have challenges on the TV side, but I don’t fixate on what used to be, because those days are long gone. I just focus on what’s the reality of the business today and moving forward. You can’t compare it to what it used to be. That’s a fool’s errand.”
NESN is particularly fortunate in that it is aligned with two franchises that eat up the entire calendar. As it is, the Venn Diagram of Sox and Bruins fans looks like a manhole lid, but as each team enjoys about five months of undivided attention, there are very few breaks in the action. This dynamic alone has served as something of a churn-buster for NESN, as does its heavy investment in shoulder programming (a strategy that flies in the face of the standard RSN budget-slashing).
While most college broadcast-journalism programs tend to encourage would-be talent to ditch their regional accents in favor of a more neutral, untraceable delivery, TV pros who came up in the bigs aren’t subject to that sort of verbal nullification. Nobody’s ever tried to chase the Framingham out of Lou Merloni’s voice, and while his accent isn’t as pronounced as Remy’s inimitable Somerset honk, it’s what every actor playing a Boston guy should shoot for.
For Merloni, it’s almost as if NESN is paying him to watch baseball … which is something he’d be doing regardless of whether he was drawing a salary.
“I grew up a fan of this team,” Merloni said. “Even when I played for the Boston Red Sox, there were times when I was still a fan of the Boston Red Sox. So now I’m bringing all those associations with me into the booth and I still need them to win every night. And when they don’t I get upset, just like everybody back in their living rooms is upset.”
And while the people in those living rooms may not be thrilled with this year’s Sox, their connection to the team remains sacrosanct regardless of its record. They’ll gripe to the techs screening calls at the local sports-talk radio shows and rage in the chat, but not too many fans are ditching baseball this summer for some other, lesser distraction. You don’t quit going to Mass on Sundays just because one of the ushers cut you off the other day in the parking lot of the Nines.
Merloni’s no different.
“I grew up here, you know, and sometimes I’ll look up at the scoreboard going around the league and it’s like, I don’t really care what they’re doing out there,” Merloni said. “It doesn’t matter what they’re doing. All that matters is what’s in front of me, and that’s this baseball game right now, that’s the Boston Red Sox. And I think that’s sort of how everybody thinks here—that’s just the nature of being a Red Sox fan.”
NESN will trot out its latest wrinkle Friday night when it bows “Sox in the Box,” a new pros-only booth featuring Merloni, Middlebrooks and Papelbon. Under the weekend configuration, Merloni will handle the play-by-play duties while the other ex-Sox see to the analysis. Leaning heavily on the experiences of the former ballplayers, the “Sox in the Box” treatment will be repeated during Saturday afternoon’s outing against Texas.
Merloni has not worked a game with Papelbon before, but he says he’s looking forward to sharing the booth with the former reliever. “He’s a ball of energy,” Merloni chuckled. “He says exactly what he’s thinking, and he kind of looks at it like, ‘I don’t really care how you react to me,’ which is great. He’s added a lot to what NESN’s doing and I think it’s going to be a good time. Although I’ll let Will Middlebrooks kinda keep him in line.”
As for how Merloni’s mood will be if the Sox slide even further in the AL East standings? “It’s a lot more fun when they’re playing I’m Shipping Up to Boston and we’re winning the ballgame,” he said. “That’s eluded us a bit in Fenway this year, but winning is always a good time.”
