Zac Brown Band to Debut 'Sunday Night Baseball' Opening on NBC The Zac Brown Band has joined an elite group of artists who have created iconic opening segments for major sports broadcasts, following in the footsteps of Carrie Underwood and Lenny Kravitz. The three-time Grammy Award-winning Southern rock band will perform a reimagined version of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression Part 2” as the opening act for NBC’s Sunday Night Baseball, marking a significant milestone in their career. The segment will debut during the first game of the new Sunday night baseball series, when the Atlanta Braves host the Cleveland Guardians on a date yet to be confirmed. The band’s performance, which blends rock elements with the original song’s dramatic flair, was crafted in collaboration with NBC Sports creative director Tripp Dixon. Dixon highlighted the song’s unique qualities, noting that its use of an organ and the opening line “Welcome back, my friends to the show that never ends” resonated with the concept of baseball as “The Show.” The choice also ties into the shared theme of anticipation for Sunday night, a motif that has been central to previous openings by Underwood for Sunday Night Football and Kravitz for Sunday Night Basketball. The segment was filmed in Milwaukee last month, with a brief clip featuring in NBC’s opening night broadcast between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers. Brown expressed pride in the final product, describing the collaboration as a “genuine partnership” that brought the band’s energy to life. “We put everything we had into the performance, and then watching it come together with the visuals, the production—it took on a whole new life,” he said in an email to The Associated Press. “The folks at NBC Sports really understood the energy we were going for.#nbc #atlanta_braves #zac_brown_band #sunday_night_baseball #tripp_dixon
