Marquee Sports Network Dives Into Cubs’ Farm System With Road to Wrigley Whiparound Show

As the Chicago Cubs front office undertakes a rebuild in an effort to return the team to contender status, many fans have turned their eyes to the team’s farm system in recent years. With elite talent like outfielders Pete Crow-Armstrong and Brennen Davis ascending the Cubs’ minor-league ranks, Marquee Sports Network has dedicated much of its programming to covering the farm system. The Chicago-based RSN is taking it a step further with Road to Wrigley: a first-of-its-kind minor-league baseball whiparound show that showcases multiple Cubs minor-league broadcasts simultaneously.

Road to Wrigley provides live in-game look-ins at the Chicago Cubs’ four minor-league affiliates.

“In this day and age, when almost all of the minor-league games are being streamed, we wanted to give Cubs fans a chance to see these young kids coming up firsthand,” says Marquee Sports Network SVP, Programming and Production, Mike Santini. “The Cubs have got all these great young players, and they’ve made a bunch of trades and are building up their system. We feel this is a way to bring that to the fans so they can see these guys and get excited and get to know them and make a connection.”

After a soft launch on July 15 and official debut on Aug. 12, Marquee is trotting out its third edition of Road to Wrigley tonight at 6:30 p.m. CT/7:30 ET. The broadcast features live in-game look-ins from Cubs affiliates Triple-A Iowa, Double-A Tennessee, Single-A South Bend, and Single-A Myrtle Beach. Hosted by Elise Menaker and featuring Player Development Analysts Lance Brozdowski and Jim Callis, Road to Wrigley broadcasts offer concurrent split-screen feeds, highlights, analysis, and breakdowns.

Santini and Senior Coordinating Producer Nick Steger, both MLB Network veterans, are well-acquainted with the whiparound format, thanks to their days working on MLB Tonight. Associate Producer Mike Norman, who is at the front bench with Director Kevin Dusold for Road to Wrigley productions, also played a key role in the show’s conception and development.

Inside the Workflow: From Minor League Parks to Wrigleyville

According to SVP, Technical Operations, Deb Schneider, Marquee’s engineering team worked closely with Major League Baseball, LTN Communications, and the in-house production teams at each minor-league venue to establish a reliable transmission workflow. Marquee takes in the program feed produced at each venue via an encoder deployed by MLB at the minor-league ballparks for streaming on MiLB.TV.

“It’s an interesting workflow in that the feed goes to AWS for streaming on the MLB app and LTN [is entitled] to grab that feed and send it to us in the studio,” Schneider says. “It took a bit of coordination by some very smart engineers on our side and at Major League Baseball. They did a terrific job ideating this and making sure that it all got coordinated properly. And it has worked out very smoothly for us.”

He credits Marquee Senior Director, Technical Operations, Kevin Reilly and Director, Engineering and IT, Gabe Joseph, along with MLB VP, Media Operations, Dan Blanchard, for putting the transmission workflow together.

“Bringing in four feeds at the same time and maintaining the signal integrity so that that all the feeds look good and sound good is challenging,” says Schneider, “especially when you consider that these stadiums are not necessarily on the level of a major-league stadium from an infrastructure standpoint. But we have gotten the hang of it, thanks to the hard work of our engineering team.”

Road to Wrigley is produced from the control room at Marquee Sports Network’s Wrigleyville production facility in Chicago.

The broadcast itself is produced in Marquee’s Wrigleyville control room with Norman and Dusold at the front bench and a separate team led by Steger monitoring all the games and helping decide which game to go to, depending on the situation.

“[Steger] is feeding information to the front bench, and then the final calls come from [the director and producer],” says Santini. “Since there are four games going on at once, the producer can’t follow every single play because there is just so much traffic going on. We’ve got [Steger] leading the second team, which is aware of what’s going on in each individual game and helps Mike and Kevin go to the right place at the right time.”

Look and Feel: Whiparound Style Presents Unique Challenges

Although Marquee already produces a biweekly half-hour Road to Wrigley studio show and is scheduled to air up to 39 full minor-league games this year across all four full-season affiliates, the network created a graphics package for the new whiparound show. Marquee’s creative team produced the graphics package with a Wrigley Field theme and provided custom two-box, three-box, and four-box elements for whiparound portions of the show.

“Nick Steger and I came from MLB Network,” says Santini, “so we had a pretty good idea of the elements that we would need to be able to do this since we’re borrowing from MLB Tonight and how they go from game to game: for example, you don’t want to go to a four-box too often — only when you’re transitioning somewhere else. It’s that kind of [knowledge] that allowed us to hit the ground running.”

While the ultra-fast pace of the whiparound style presents its own challenges, Santini says, it’s actually the intense preparation and research prior to the live show that is most challenging for the on-air talent and production team.

“I think the biggest challenge is knowing enough about all of the levels of the Cubs’ minor leagues and being familiar with all these players,” he says. “Doing all the research to have knowledge and familiarity with the teams and the players has been a huge undertaking. Luckily, we have a great group of talent and [production] people that came into this with vast knowledge and have only increased that knowledge since.”

Looking Ahead: More Road to Wrigley Likely Coming in 2023

Tonight will probably be the last Road to Wrigley broadcast of the season, Santini says, but Marquee is expected to bring back the program next season.

“I think this will be here to stay and is something that we’ll continue to do next year and beyond,” he explains. “I believe that, the more we show these young players, the deeper the connection will be with the fans. Hopefully, at some point in the future when these guys reach the major leagues, we will see a benefit in the ratings because people have grown up with these kids through the Cubs system. It has created a stronger bond between the fan and the players.”

Road to Wrigley begins tonight at 6:30 p.m. CT/7:30 ET on Marquee Sports Network.