So much about the business of regional sports networks is centered on prime-time broadcasts of games, leaving daytime programming in markets as a particularly thorny challenge. But the YES Network is turning to a traditional television staple: Saturday morning cartoons.
The Yankees-controlled RSN has struck a deal with global animation developer Tzero Studios to create Bronx Buds, a baseball-themed series based around a fictitious Bronx-based, school-age baseball team called the Pinstripes.
Bronx Buds will involve seven-minute episodes airing on the YES app, with new content every Saturday morning starting Aug. 17. The decision to focus distribution of the project to mobile was based in part on extending a YES Network focus on the app since the product’s 2021 debut that has been buttressed with a deep slate of other original content. That strategy is also a modern-day recall to television before the proliferation of cable in the 1980s, when Saturday morning cartoons were a fixture of network programming.
Not Like Other RSNs
YES Network, meanwhile, has been somewhat insulated from the broader RSN industry issues given its existence within the Yankees corporate umbrella. To that end, network executives said Bronx Buds is also an extension of its history of aggressive moves into many other broadcast technology and programming innovations.
“We’re already set apart from the other [RSNs], so this is another move to be on the leading edge,” Jason Feneque, YES Network senior director of distribution and special projects, tells Front Office Sports.
The network sold a presenting sponsorship to cookware brand HexClad to aid in the development of Bronx Buds. Tzero Studios, meanwhile, has personnel with credits on other major animated series such as SpongeBob SquarePants, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Hey Arnold!
A Yankees Feel to It
Bronx Buds will not involve any Yankees branding, but the series still seeks to give a distinct sense of place between the Pinstripes team name and Bronx setting, and area-specific references such as the borough’s famed Arthur Avenue and the subway. Storylines will involve themes of teamwork, friendship, and promoting a love of baseball as YES Network seeks to build its youth audience.
The show is premiering in the middle of baseball season. But both sides have already committed to a second season, and Tzero Studios did not rule out trying to link the project with the YES Network’s other key source of live programming, the NBA’s Nets.
“Who’s to say the Bronx Buds don’t eventually traverse to Brooklyn to play basketball?” Justin Shenkarow, the voice of Harold Berman on Hey Arnold! and Tzero Studios cofounder, tells FOS.
