By Jason Snell

April 7, 2023 1:10 PM PT

Friday Night Baseball’s radio overlay really works

As I write this, Apple has just debuted its Friday Night Baseball broadcasts for this season—in the afternoon, thanks to coverage of a Cubs day game. And I’m happy to report that the local radio overlay feature works well. Accessible from the More (three dots) button on iPhone and iPad and the sound icon on Mac and Apple TV, I was able to switch from Apple’s announcers to sound from the Cubs’ home radio broadcast. (Alas, audio from Rangers road games are strangely not available this season.)

The integration is flawless. Radio announcer audio is synced up perfectly with the video. When the radio broadcast isn’t providing audio, the broadcast plays stadium background audio. (In fact, it sounds to me like perhaps Apple is grabbing an announcer-only feed from the radio broadcast and then mixing in its own background audio—either that or it’s perfectly synced.)

Also I’m happy to report that Apple’s advanced probability forecasts are rounded to the nearest percentage, so a player is listed as having a 14% hit probability instead of 14.2% or 14.18%—a level of precision that’s unnecessary and probably unreal.

Finally, Apple’s scorebox still features three dots to represent the number of outs in an inning, which is as it should be, since there are three outs in an inning. (Many broadcasters make the mistake of only displaying two dots, which is criminal.)

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