Mark DeRosa is in his element with a bat in his hand, a microphone clipped to his shirt and an enormous video screen in front of him. He might as well be teaching a class, using the bat as a pointer and a prop as he analyzes hitting.
Yet he looks and sounds anything but professorial as he breaks down a hitter’s swing on the “Skybox” set of MLB Network’s morning show, “MLB Central.” DeRosa’s sleeves are rolled up as he stands before a screen 13 feet high and 17 feet wide, mimicking the swing while explaining his movements in his New Jersey accent.
DeRosa speaks with the authority of 16 major-league seasons in which he played for eight teams, including two seasons with the Cubs. He tells the control room when to stop a video and when to rewind and supports his points with analytics and statistics.
It’s baseball analysis at its best and a highlight of “MLB Central,” which is celebrating its 10-year anniversary and will air its 1,000th episode in June. Last week, the show received its first Sports Emmy nomination for Outstanding Daily Studio Show. DeRosa has co-hosted with Robert Flores and Lauren Shehadi since the start of the 2018 season.
“The three of us have really good chemistry that’s been built over time,” said DeRosa, who joined MLB Network in November 2013 after retiring from playing. “We wanna laugh, we wanna tell the truth, but we are not there to hunt the negative. I wanted to create a show that I would watch if I played. It’s a fun, vibrant morning show.”
“De-Ro” supplies both elements, but he takes his analysis seriously. That comes from the passion instilled in him at a young age by his father, who watched every Yankees game on TV and constantly talked about strategy, peppering his son with multiple-choice questions.
DeRosa, 50, now lives in Atlanta with his wife and two kids, but he flies back to New Jersey every Sunday night during baseball season. MLB Network’s studio is in Secaucus, about 8 miles from DeRosa’s native Passaic, and his mother, brother and other relatives still live in the area – a big selling point when DeRosa took the job. He heads home after the show Friday.
Naturally, DeRosa spends much of his week watching baseball.
“He tells us all the time – we have a group chat for the show – he has a four-box of games,” Shehadi said. “And what he does is, we’ll look at the box score sometimes, and what jumps out is the walk-off home run. But he thinks it’s the stolen base that changed the complexion of the fourth inning and as a result changed the game.”
“It’s never out of my thoughts,” DeRosa said of the show. “And the players deserve that. It’d be easy to just pick apart Aaron Judge and Bryce Harper all day. But I go back to my career, there’s a lot of great guys in the game that get hot for a week. I wanna put a spotlight on as many players as we can. I’m up watching the games at night, but it’s what I’d be doing anyway.”
For his segments, DeRosa marries his knowledge with the research of editorial producer Eric Nehs. They’ve worked together for six years. Nehs has made DeRosa value analytics even more than he did, and DeRosa has shown Nehs videos to explain aspects of hitting. They communicate throughout the week and over the weekend.
“De-Ro is the most unique analyst I’ve ever worked with because of his ability to not only know the game, watch the game, keep up with the game, but his ability to think like a TV producer,” Flores said. “He’s got a unique ability to put his analysis and thoughts in a way that’s going to be entertaining for the viewer, that’s going to be good for the show.”
As a player, DeRosa was good for the clubhouse. He was vocal and tried to bond with his teammates. It’s partly why he played for so many teams – and why he’s so personable on TV. When asked about his time with the Cubs, DeRosa didn’t hesitate.
“It was the best two years of my career,” he said. “Without question.”
DeRosa signed with the Cubs in November 2006. The 2007 team won the National League Central with only 85 wins before being swept in the division series by the Diamondbacks. The 2008 Cubs had the best record in the league at 97-64 but were swept in the first round by the Dodgers. As crushing as those outcomes were, they didn’t detract from DeRosa’s experience.
“I rented a brownstone on Diversey and Paulina,” he said, “and I remember driving to the stadium drinking a cup of coffee, windows down, on Southport, and you felt a buzz, almost a college football environment. And you couldn’t help but get jacked up.
“My favorite part of playing in the big leagues was when the Cubs’ starter, whoever that may be, whether it was Ryan Dempster or Z [Carlos Zambrano] or Ted Lilly, would turn to our team and go, ‘You guys ready?’ And you’d run out on that field. There was nothing cooler than that.”
On Dec. 31, 2008, the Cubs traded DeRosa to Cleveland. It was about as crushing as those playoff losses.
“He said it was his favorite time of his life, and when he got traded, a piece of him died,” Shehadi said. “Every time we’ll go on Ballpark Cam and we’ll see a day game on the North Side of Chicago, he’s like, ‘Take me back.’ ”
DeRosa will be back in the dugout for the 2026 World Baseball Classic as the manager of Team USA. He guided the U.S. to a silver-medal finish in the 2023 event. DeRosa already has begun assembling his squad, naming Yankees star Aaron Judge as team captain this week.
“The biggest thing for me will be the recruitment of players and trying to create an experience for them,” DeRosa said. “I don’t wanna bother them. Winning a World Series is paramount, but I wanna be in a position where we build this roster out correctly, we’re in a position to attack every game. [I’m] probably writing down 75 different lineups.”
In the meantime, he’ll be on TV, essentially selling himself as someone players would love to play for.