Scott Rogowsky Joining DAZN Baseball Show

Scott Rogowsky, the host of HQ Trivia, will be part of the daily cast of DAZN’s Red Zone Channel esque MLB Show, ChangeUp. The show will air from 7pm ET until the final game of the night is over, and Rogowsky’s shift will be alongside Adnan Virk on weeknights from 7-10:30.

Rogowsky tells The Big Lead that he was profoundly excited when he heard from his agent at ICM about the potential opportunity, as his father “indoctrinated” him with a love for the game from a very young age.

“It’s my favorite sport but beyond that it’s an elemental part of my personality,” Rogowsky says. “It’s just ingrained in me since birth. I was actually looking at old baby photos over the weekend — there was a ‘Scott’-embroidered baseball over my crib, and little toy bats and glove when I was a year old.”

Rogowsky analogizes finalizing this deal as a “call to the big leagues,” noting that he’s “been loving the sport, watching the sport, playing it, collecting it since basically I was old enough to open a pack of baseball cards.”

As MLB fanhood has become increasingly regionalized, the desire amongst the audience for national stories has diminished over the past 10-20 years. Rogowsky has a lofty goal that ChangeUp can reverse that trend. “I think we have an opportunity here to inject some personality and excitement back into the game of baseball,” he says. “The format of the show — the whiparound, live, bringing you all the action, never a dull moment between Adnan and myself and the other hosts — you’ve got baseball fanatics. We all truly love the sport. We know what we’re talking about and we know how to present it in a fun way. I think the goal is to get the country talking about baseball every night and bringing it to the forefront of the sports conversation.”

While a majority of the audience will recognize Rogowsky from their time spent playing HQ Trivia, he has made previous content forays into the world of sports. Working alongside Neil Janowitz, then an editor at ESPN the Magazine and now the editorial director of New York Magazine’s Vulture vertical, Rogowsky made a series of sports comedy/satire videos under the 12 Angry Mascots banner. These videos were discussed in a profile by the site Sports Techie last August.

When Rogowsky was making those videos, could he ever have envisioned he’d find this prominent a role in the official live rights sports media?

“To be honest it’s not something I truly envisioned,” he muses. “I didn’t think it was possible. When I was doing those videos at 12 Angry Mascots, which was 10 years ago now, I was a 24-25 year old kid. I had no contacts in the industry, no representation. I wouldn’t even know where to start or how to get this type of job. It just wasn’t something that was on the horizon. I always thought that I would operate on the margins making comedy about it and finding my own way into the industry.”

“This is truly the dream that I could never even dream,” Rogowsky continues. “As a kid, I ate, breathed, and slept SportsCenter. That was appointment viewing every morning over breakfast, at night — just watching all those personalities. I’ve absorbed it through osmosis, I think. And now I have the chance to be sort of that type of personality for future generations of baseball fans. It’s incredibly humbling.”