Karl Ravech called a Phillies-Dodgers game in Philadelphia on Monday night. By Tuesday morning, he was expected to be out of a job.
The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand reported that Ravech, 61, will be let go by ESPN as part of a new round of company-wide layoffs. Front Office Sports corroborated the news, citing its own sources. An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment.
Thirty-three years. That’s longer than most marriages last, longer than plenty of coaching staffs survive a single losing season. Ravech joined ESPN in May 1993 as an anchor and became one of the network’s most recognizable faces — a longtime host of SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight, the on-site host for World Series coverage, and eventually the lead play-by-play voice for Sunday Night Baseball from 2022 through 2025. He also called the Little League World Series and college basketball during his tenure.
The cuts come six months after ESPN purchased NFL Network in January, a deal that gave the NFL a 10 percent stake in ESPN and set off a months-long effort to merge operations across Bristol, New York, and Los Angeles. Marchand reported that while Ravech is the biggest on-air name expected to depart, the most severe layoffs are anticipated behind the scenes at NFL Network. ESPN’s parent company, Disney, is also expected to conduct its own round of cuts.
ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro was expected to address the moves in a company memo.
The layoffs began Monday night with the departure of NFL analyst Ryan Clark, who had been with the network for more than a decade. According to Awful Announcing, Clark was informed of his termination while live on the air during NFL Live — a detail that, even in a business built on tough cuts, lands like a blindside hit on a punter.
Ravech’s exit is tangled up with ESPN’s shifting baseball footprint. The network opted out of its previous MLB package — the one that included Sunday Night Baseball — before reaching a restructured deal with the league that produced a less consistent schedule this season. Sunday Night Baseball moved to NBC. MLB play-by-play announcers remaining on ESPN’s roster include Jon “Boog” Sciambi and Mike Monaco.
For a guy who spent three decades climbing from the anchor desk to the lead booth, getting walked out mid-season — one night after working a national telecast — is a cold way to close the book. But the film doesn’t lie: this is what the business looks like now.