NEW YORK — Who is the best visible face of MLB today — Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani?
Ohtani sold more jerseys than any player in Major League Baseball for a third straight season in 2025. He is a two-time MVP, a global icon and the face of the defending World Series champion Dodgers. By almost every commercial metric, the man from Japan is the biggest star in the sport.
So when NBC needed a player to anchor its very first MLB ad in 26 years, a 30-second spot that debuted during Sunday’s Super Bowl pregame show and is now airing during the Winter Olympics, who did the network pick?
Aaron Judge.
The three-time AL MVP. The captain of the New York Yankees. And the man whose home park sits just a few miles from Rockefeller Center, where NBC has called home for decades. That geographic connection turned out to be the deciding factor in one of the more surprising branding decisions of the MLB offseason.
NBC returns to baseball after a 26-year absence
The ad marks the start of NBC’s return to regular MLB coverage for the first time since 2000. The network’s new three-year deal with Major League Baseball includes the Sunday Night Baseball package that ESPN held for decades, plus an Opening Day doubleheader and Wild Card round games on both NBC and Peacock.
NBC also recently hired Clayton Kershaw, Anthony Rizzo and Joey Votto as pregame analysts, with Bob Costas hosting the Sunday Night Baseball pregame show. The network is clearly investing heavily in making baseball feel like must-watch television again.
The Opening Day doubleheader on March 26 features the Mets hosting the Pirates in the first game, followed by the World Series champion Dodgers hosting Arizona. The Yankees’ first appearance on Sunday Night Baseball is scheduled for June 28 at Boston.
MLB Chief Marketing Officer Uzma Rawn Dowler praised the partnership.
“Our new partnership with NBC and Peacock is off to an incredible start,” Dowler said. “They are promoting one of our top stars in a new spot, integrating popular NBC talent, and airing it in highly viewed programming.”
NBC explains why Judge beat Ohtani for the spotlight
The commercial itself is pure NBC. Judge, in full pinstriped No. 99 uniform, stands at Yankee Stadium with the lights blazing behind him. He launches baseballs that rocket across the city and crash into the studios and filming spaces of the “Today Show,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “Saturday Night Live” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”
The song “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” by T. Rex plays in the background. After picking up a wayward ball, Meyers growls “Judge!” in a callback to Captain Kirk screaming “Khan!” in “Star Trek II.” Judge then swings his bat, says “see you soon” and makes an “oops, my bad” face as more NBC personalities howl his name.
The ad also features Today Show hosts Craig Melvin, Al Roker and Carson Daly, SVU star Kelli Giddish, SNL cast member Kenan Thompson and a person in a peacock costume. The peacock is the only one actually hit by a Judge home run ball.
So why Judge and not Ohtani?
Lyndsay Signor, senior vice president of sports marketing for NBCUniversal, explained to Newsday that the decision came down to geography.
“There’s obviously many huge names in MLB,” Signor said. “One of the things at least for this first spot was really tying it again back to us. Our home base is 30 Rock. I think that’s what most people would associate NBCUniversal with is the home base of 30 Rock in New York City. So having all of these shows in and around shooting at 30 Rock, whether it’s ‘SNL’ or Seth’s show or the ‘Today Show,’ having that New York City anchor really lent itself to working with the Yankees and Aaron Judge as one of the biggest stars in MLB for a spot like this.”
She added that the concept only works if the baseballs are being launched from a ballpark close enough to 30 Rock to make the visual gag land.
“Particularly if literally he’s hitting balls from Yankee Stadium crashing into 30 Rock,” Signor said. “It really made sense to go out to him for the first spot that we debuted at the Super Bowl.”
Judge remains baseball’s most bankable New York brand
Ohtani topped MLB jersey sales for the third consecutive year in 2025, with Judge finishing second. Only Mookie Betts, Derek Jeter and Judge himself have ever led jersey sales for three straight seasons since MLB began tracking that data in 2010.
But Judge’s connection to New York gives him a unique advantage when it comes to network-specific marketing. He has won three of the last four AL MVP awards. He leads a Yankees franchise that commands the largest local television market in baseball. And he plays in the same city where NBC produces its biggest shows.
That combination made him the obvious choice for the network’s reintroduction to the sport. The Super Bowl LX broadcast drew nearly 125 million viewers, peaking at an all-time U.S. record of 137.8 million across NBC, Peacock and Telemundo. The Winter Olympics coverage that followed has continued putting the ad in front of massive audiences.
For Yankees fans, the ad is a reminder that their captain is not just one of the best hitters in Major League Baseball. He is the player an entire network is betting on to bring the sport back to mainstream prime time. And in a business where location matters as much as talent, playing in pinstripes still counts for something.
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