Mark DeRosa Is Still Baseball’s Swiss Army Knife

The baseball offseason is typically a time to relax and reset, but Mark DeRosa has unfinished business. 

It’s late January and the Team USA manager has been spending the month tinkering with his World Baseball Classic lineup. Obsessing over it. The moment Japan knocked out his squad, 3–2, in the 2023 championship game, he’s been scheming ways to rectify that gut-wrenching result. 

“It’s all I think about,” he tells Front Office Sports from his home in Atlanta. “It really is all I think about.”

This morning began with a Taylor ham, egg, and cheese sandwich, chased by a protein smoothie. The rest of the week has unfolded in a familiar rhythm: rounds of golf, endless phone calls, and long looks at a roster that he started building last May. He’s spent hours checking in with big-league managers, making sure they’re all looped in. “I just wanted everyone to feel comfortable,” he says. “‘Hey, you guys good? Is there anything special that I need to know about your player? This is how we are going to use them. Are you O.K. with that?’” 

The anxiety is attached to genuine excitement. After the electricity of the last WBC, more American stars took notice. They wanted in. Now, in his second go-around as manager, DeRosa has assembled the most talent-rich U.S. roster—one that includes Cy Young winners Paul Skenes and Tarik Skubal, MVP Aaron Judge and runner-up Cal Raleigh, among a wave of other All-Stars.

“There’s a fear of missing out,” DeRosa says. “There were a lot of guys who said ‘No’ to come in last time that I think realized, ‘Oh my God, what an opportunity.’ They’re not passing it up.” He pauses, then adds the other, simpler truth: “Guys want to be in a dugout with Judge. Guys want to be around Paul Skenes and see what he’s about.”

Guys also want to be around DeRosa, both on the field and off. 

Since retiring from a 16-year big-league career in 2013, the New Jersey native has become one of the most entertaining and insightful personalities in baseball outside of his managerial duties. For the past decade, he’s cohosted MLB Central, MLB Network’s in-season, Emmy-nominated morning show, waking up baseball fans with infectious enthusiasm and fine-tuned analysis that goes beyond recapping highlights. He breaks down swings, spearheads colorful segments, and scrutinizes marquee matchups with a superfan’s laser focus—instincts he gleaned as a utility man with several clubs, including the Braves, Rangers, Cubs, and Giants. 

“You can’t find someone more dedicated to the current game,” MLB Central cohost Lauren Shehadi tells FOS. “He wants to do right by the player.” 

DeRosa’s edge is the same one it’s always been: versatility. He thrived as a utility player during his own MLB career and has taken a similar approach to his next chapter, moving seamlessly among analyst, evangelist, and manager. People in his orbit agree: down to his Jersey accent, “DeRo” is as real as they come. 

The Analyst

DeRosa made his MLB Network debut as a member of the Giants during the 2011 postseason. He still had family a couple of towns over from the Secaucus, N.J.–based studio, but he hadn’t courted the idea of returning to the Northeast to start a media career. Two years later, as retirement crept closer, analyst Harold Reynolds kept nudging him toward television. 

DeRosa thought back to how much fun he’d had popping in as a guest (including a memorable appearance on Intentional Talk alongside Munenori Kawasaki), and he came to a simple conclusion: “I just thought it would be a nice transition.”

Ahead of the 2014 season, he signed a contract to provide analysis on MLB Tonight and inject more of his personality into the network. A year later, he was tapped to cohost its morning show with Matt Vasgersian (later replaced by Robert Flores) and Shehadi. The upgrade was significant—a 140-day commitment that meant living in New Jersey five days a week. He called his wife, who agreed “it made a ton of sense,” despite the travel. “My passion for the game was the draw for me, and the network’s location was so perfect. I jumped at it.”

The transition was mostly seamless. “You’re not going to be locked in and totally comfortable on the couch from Day 1,” he says. “But I thought: Put the work in. Do it the right way. Stack great days on top of each other. Trust the research department. Trust your producers. Trust Matty and Lauren to make you better and be willing to learn.”

Now, with a decade on the job, DeRosa has developed a strict routine during the season. The night before each show, he’ll take out his pad and pen and watch several of the East Coast games, running multiple screens. He’ll scribble anything interesting—a bullpen move or a call that changed the game. Then, as the West Coast games get started around 10 p.m., he’ll jump on the line with a few producers, along with Flores and Shehadi, to discuss the night’s most pressing nuggets and build out the next morning’s show.

“It’s just a free flow of ideas for different things we could do,” says senior producer Rich Savino, which “might mean mocking up a segment on A.J. Hinch’s exotic cat sanctuary.”

After the call, DeRosa emails his “ride-or-dies,” editorial producer Eric Nehs and video editor Jacob Bader, to pull out any germane metrics and cutaways for each segment. The next morning, DeRosa joins a Zoom call on his drive to the studio, followed by a tape session with Bader in the editing room, where loose ideas crystallize into show-ready graphics. “He thinks like a TV producer,” Flores says. “He’s got a good mind and eye for what’s going to work on television.”

Once he has his coffee, DeRosa turns into a warmup act for the show’s 10 a.m. start. Shehadi says he’ll often walk in and announce something dramatic: World Series, Game 7. Let’s go! “And meanwhile, it’s April 20th.” Savino agrees: It just fires everyone up. “He kind of brings that vibe to the building. You just want to be around him.” 

DeRosa’s “bread and butter,” according to coordinating producer Mark Capalbo, are his 10-minute segments in the Skybox, the studio’s big-screen demonstration stage, where he dissects hitting and pitching mechanics. There, DeRosa monologues about Kyle Schwarber’s hand placement or William Contreras’s hard-hit rates—a mix of analytics and his own observations, plus commands to the booth to “roll that back!”  

DeRosa attributes his performative, ad-libbing skills to the local musicals his mother enrolled him in throughout elementary school. Despite the nerves, he always committed to the audience—a trait he hasn’t given up. “I want the players to know that I’m watching,” he says. “I’m very sensitive to that.” 

The Manager

The qualities that turned DeRosa into a compelling TV analyst are the same ones that have made him a natural fit as a manager.

At the end of 2015, as his reputation around the game quietly grew from his broadcasts, DeRosa kicked the tires on the Marlins’ open managerial position. He’d had a successful first season on MLB Central, but he “wanted to see if it scratched an itch—if it led to something else,” DeRosa says. 

His early conversations were encouraging. “You look at the skill sets of successful managers—they’re normally not the superstar players; they’re the guys who have to work hard, who have to prepare better than everyone else,” says Mike Hill, who interviewed DeRosa while serving as the Marlins’ president of baseball operations. “And that’s how he was as a player.” Ultimately, though, Hill chose DeRosa’s boyhood idol Don Mattingly to lead the team, adding that if he’d had a younger roster, DeRosa “very well could have been manager at that time.”

Two years later, DeRosa auditioned for the Mets job, but left empty-handed again. After the dust settled, New York GM Sandy Alderson offered advice that stuck. “He basically said, ‘At no point in our six-hour interview process did you ever truly look me in the eye and say, ‘I’m not leaving until I’m the manager of the Mets,’” DeRosa recalls. “He said, ‘We want guys who are willing to bleed for this.’”

By the time DeRosa visited the MLB league office with the hopes of leading the WBC Team USA in 2023, he’d acquired the right mindset. This time around, his even bigger public profile and familiarity with the league made him a prime candidate—and the passion he’d cultivated on screen finally emerged. “I felt like this was the perfect opportunity to truly stick my nose into one of these spots,” he says. “When I went in there, that’s what I was like. ‘You can’t tell me I’m not the perfect guy for this.’”

He got the gig. 

Although he’d never managed a game, DeRosa entered the Team USA clubhouse with credibility. On the diamond, he’d been conditioned by the game’s pecking order, trained to choose his words carefully around star teammates. But television rewired that instinct. Being effective on air meant assessing the biggest names with both honesty and sensitivity, a balance that, in turn, became the foundation of his coaching philosophy.

“The players know that he respects what they’re doing,” cohost Flores says. “He’s been where they’re at. I think that carries a lot of weight and goes a long way.”

Though the 2023 tournament ended in disappointment—Shohei Ohtani striking out then–MLB teammate Mike Trout in the ninth inning—DeRosa learned a lot about building a roster, writing out a lineup, and motivating a group of elite athletes. “If I started just making bullpen moves left and right, we would have run out of arms,” DeRosa says. “There are certain things that you’ve got to be leery of.” 

He learned to earn his players’ trust and create a comfortable environment. “You’re not going to make everyone happy,” he says. “But the guys know if your heart’s in it.” That’s the primary reason that Hill, now Team USA’s GM, brought DeRosa back for 2026. “It was very obvious that he had unfinished business,” Hill says. “And he was going to take all of those learned experiences to build the strongest roster we possibly could to help us win it all.” 

The Ambassador

In between his managerial duties and studio analysis, DeRosa has become something of an MLB ambassador, filling in wherever the sport needs him. 

With a potential lockout looming in 2027, DeRosa views this WBC tournament as something larger than a two-and-a-half-week burst of international baseball. A deep run by Team USA, he believes, could amplify the sport’s momentum, pull in new attention, and apply real pressure to avoid a work stoppage. “The game is just in such a great place,” he says. “I just don’t understand why we can’t figure out a way for everybody to be happy.”

He got a preview of how quickly emotions can flare last summer, while touring clubhouses alongside commissioner Rob Manfred in an effort to smooth labor relations. Inside the Phillies clubhouse, tensions spiked between Manfred and Bryce Harper, then escalated when DeRosa made a sarcastic crack about Manfred’s retaliatory instincts, which some players thought was a real threat. About two hours later, DeRosa extinguished the issue with Harper.

Their quick reconciliation suggested DeRosa’s ability to stay honest and accountable to the players. Harper, notably, will man first base for Team USA. “He knows where my heart is with him,” DeRosa says. “He knows the sweat equity and time I’ve put in with him and how I feel about him as a person. You’re not always going to agree on everything.”

Ultimately, DeRosa wants to use his time as manager to create energy, build camaraderie, and provide the best opportunity for his players to succeed. “I’m very candid about what the expectations are, how certain things can unfold in this two-and-a-half-week process,” he says. “It’ll never be about me. It’s always about the players. … That’s the way I attack work. I want the people around me to get the credit.”

He takes the same approach at MLB Central. The show only works when he knows he’s involving everyone. “He always says, ‘We get people to believe in themselves,’” Capalbo says. “And they add value when that happens.” 

Still, the looming labor quagmire has made it hard for DeRosa to look too far ahead. “Every time I’ve ever tried to have like a three- to five-year plan,” he says, “something always better happens.” Instead, his focus is much narrower: Bring home a World Baseball Classic trophy. Help push a new CBA across the finish line. Honor the next two years of his MLB Network contract. “I think if I’ve accomplished those three things,” DeRosa says, “I’d be pretty happy.”

So would his teammates. Both Flores and Shehadi have gotten a kick out of their colleague sharing behind-the-scenes insights into the lineup and being a subject of their on-air discussions this month. They’re also extremely nervous to watch the games unfold. 

Flores says: “Everyone at MLB Central will be living and dying with every pitch.”