For the last decade, Mike Pereira has served as the top NFL rules analyst on FOX Sports. He’s great at it, to such an extent that other networks felt obligated to follow suit and hire rules analysts of their own.
But part of the reason Pereira has been successful as the FOX rules analyst is because he spent 14 years as an NFL official prior to taking up a career in broadcasting. It’s probably fair to say Pereira wouldn’t be a great NFL rules expert had he never officiated in the league, making it odd that FOX once attempted to add Pereira’s analysis to their MLB coverage.
Joining midday hosts Greg Papa and John Lund on KNBR in the Bay Area, Pereira said that a few years into his tenure with FOX, they had the idea of using him as rules analyst for their MLB broadcast, but it was nixed by Joe Torre. The plan was to send Pereira to school, let him train as an umpire and come back as the rules expert for both the MLB and NFL coverage on FOX.
But that alludes to the idea that FOX believes Pereira’s a talented NFL rules analyst based on his general judgement ability, and not his football expertise. If that’s the case, why stop at baseball? Why not make Pereira a FOX analyst on The Masked Singer or Hell’s Kitchen?
Ultimately, Pereira believed Torre’s decision to nix the idea of using him as baseball’s rules analyst was a good one. “He was right,” Pereira said on KNBR. “If I was a baseball umpire and here’s a football official that said I disagree with this call, I wouldn’t have had the credibility whatsoever with the umpires.”
As the MLB chief baseball officer, Torre was probably more against Pereira filling the role for FOX than he was with the specific idea of having a rules expert on the broadcast. Surely there are retired umpires who would be interested in the job. But according to Pereira, FOX had trouble finding an ump willing to forgo their league benefits.
“We did interview some umpires, retired umpires to see if they were interested or if they’d be any good,” Pereira said. “And we found a couple that seemed to be pretty good but to be truthful they have a great disability program with MLB and they were told that they would lose their disability if they were paid by Fox to be a rules expert. So we never found one.”
Personally, I’m not sure how necessary a baseball rules expert is. NFL rules are very complex whereas the baseball rulebook is much less convoluted. In baseball, replay is mostly used to look at a “bang bang play” such as a close call at first base. But most of those are judgement or timing calls that can be better determined with replay, rarely does an MLB broadcast booth need clarification or explanation from a deemed rules expert.