Fox Sports Films will continue its swings within the sports documentary genre with an FS1 special on baseball superstar Julio Rodriguez that will air tonight (July 16) after Fox’s coverage of Major League Baseball’s All-Star game.
The documentary, Welcome to the J-Rod Show, follows the Seattle Mariners outfielder and 2022 American League Rookie of the Year from his roots in the Dominican Republic to his major-league debut. The documentary is part of Fox Sports’ strategy to develop original content to complement high-profile live sports events, VP of development and original programming Barry Nugent said.
“We thought it would be great if we did a documentary on a guy who's just starting out but who is a leading face of the league,“ Nugent told Multichannel News. ”We’ll have this introduction to him and his career, and what we found is that the dude has an infectious way of loving baseball.”
Prior Fox Sports documentaries include The Game that Changed Everything: Yankees vs. Red Sox ‘04 ALCS, which debuted prior to the World Series last October, and I Am Kevin Harvick, a profile of the NASCAR driver and Fox analyst that aired on FS1 this past February after Fox’s Daytona 500 telecast.
“We tend to target our films as shoulder programming for the big events that we have,” he said. “There’s no greater lead-in than the live events that we have … it’s so exciting and so important for the subject.”
Along with tying in with marquee Fox Sports events, Nugent said the documentaries also benefit from having Fox Sports’ on-air talent participate. For the J-Rod documentary — executive-produced by Derek Jeter’s Cap 2 Productions — Fox MLB studio analyst and former Mariners great Alex Rodriguez talks about the emerging superstar.
Both Jeter and Rodriguez also appeared in the Yankees vs Red Sox ‘04 ALCS documentary, with the Yankees teammates speaking for the first time about the infamous series in which Boston defeated New York after trailing 3-0.
“We would have only done [that documentary] if we could get the New York Yankees side of the story, because up to that point [Rodriguez] and Jeter had never talked about it because it was so heartbreaking to them,” he said. “With our documentaries, we’re trying to show a more intimate portrait both on and off the field.”
Fox Sports is developing more documentaries that revolve around tentpole Fox Sports live events, Nugent said, including the Super Bowl in February and the network’s NASCAR coverage. “We bring in a certain number of people into the tent to watch the live event, so you want to have them stick around with more in-depth stories to tell on some of those subjects,” he said.
As for Fox’s coverage of tonight’s 94th MLB All-Star Game, Joe Davis and John Smoltz will handle play-by-play and commentary, with Ken Rosenthal and Tom Verducci providing inside information and in-game reports from the field, Fox said. Fox will open its 25th broadcast of the Midsummer Classic with a pregame show hosted by Jeter, Rodriguez, David Ortiz and Kevin Burkhardt.
