Opening day is a ritual in renewal, and in the early-afternoon hours of April 3, Dan Kolko welcomed his Nationals.TV audience back to Southeast Washington. “Make your way into Nationals Park with us,” he said, the excitement in his voice as clear as the blue skies overhead.

Change had come for so much of the Nationals’ franchise this offseason: a new manager, a new president of baseball operations, a new approach to player development. But the Nationals’ broadcast itself had also been reshaped. And if the promise of a new on-field direction felt like an abstraction just six games into the 2026 season, the drone camera hovering over Nationals Park offered proof of a new era in at least one realm.

“That is epic,” analyst Kevin Frandsen said as the drone floated over the home plate entrance to the ballpark, fans dotting the stands before the Nationals’ series opener against the Los Angeles Dodgers like confetti.

“That was, as we say in the business, the absolute money shot for me,” said Wendy Bailey, the Nationals’ executive director of content and broadcasting. “It was so beautiful.”

After an offseason split from the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, which is controlled by the Baltimore Orioles, Nationals broadcasts sound and look different this season. Kolko has taken over as the full-time play-by-play voice, partnering with Frandsen in the booth. Alexa Datt is the new pre- and postgame host and in-game reporter.

Backing them is a new level of support and technology from MLB Local Media, the arm of Major League Baseball that now produces and distributes regional television broadcasts for 14 of MLB’s 30 teams. Nationals broadcasters and officials say the partnership has helped lift Nationals.TV in its inaugural season to levels that were out of reach under MASN.

“It’s all access, it’s all new,” Frandsen said, “and it’s all so great.”

The most obvious changes are in front of the camera. Kolko, a Montgomery County native who’d worked on Nationals broadcasts for over a decade on MASN, ​​was named the team’s new full-time play-by-play voice in January. He replaced longtime announcer Bob Carpenter, who retired after last season. Kolko had stepped in for Carpenter as he scaled down his appearances on MASN over his final years in the booth.

Datt, also a Montgomery County native and Maryland graduate, was hired after covering the St. Louis Cardinals and St. Louis Blues as a host for FanDuel Sports Network Midwest. She was also the first woman to handle play-by-play duties for a Cardinals spring training game.

Their partnership with Frandsen, a former Nationals utility player who joined MASN’s broadcast team in 2022, has injected a different energy into the broadcast. Datt said they have a shared pop-culture language. (Crucially, they all quote lines from “Billy Madison” and “Old School.”) Their hope, she added, is to evoke the hangout vibes of “Inside the NBA,” the popular halftime and postgame studio show for “NBA on ESPN” and, formerly, “NBA on TNT” broadcasts.

“That model is trying so hard to be replicated across all sports in every broadcast,” Datt said. “And baseball is probably the ultimate, because there are so many games. You want to feel like that every single time you have the opportunity to invite somebody in to hang out with you to watch baseball.”

They have more help than previous broadcasts under MASN did. Chip Winfield, a longtime coordinating producer, has rejoined the crew for road games. Bailey said his presence has helped streamline behind-the-scenes work, from devising potential stories to developing on-air rapport to creating graphics. And during broadcasts, Datt and Bailey said, the broadcast now has enough manpower to provide updated stats for in-game reports and produce in-game interviews.

MLB Local Media itself offers another “army” of editors, Bailey said, who expedite the production timeline for tasks that would’ve kept MASN staffers up for most of the night in recent years. When the Nationals visited Pittsburgh this week for a series against the Pirates, Nationals.TV prepared a package highlighting former first baseman Adam LaRoche’s ties to both franchises “on the fly,” Bailey said.

“Just those little things that you can kind of put together … and have in your arsenal as a producer for lulls in the broadcast, times that you want to just kind of bring up the momentum in the broadcast to keep people engaged, is really important,” she said.

Access has improved as well. Bailey, now in her ninth year with the organization, said MLB encourages collaboration between teams’ public relations, communications and broadcast arms in hopes of creating more engaging on-air content. “And I think there’s a real appetite for that,” she said.

On Monday, during an eventual loss to the Pirates, hitting coach Matt Borgschulte was interviewed midgame, a level of access Nationals broadcasters say they were rarely afforded under MASN. Two days earlier, only an inning after starting pitcher Foster Griffin wrapped up a scoreless, one-hit performance in an eventual win over the Milwaukee Brewers, he had a headset on outside the clubhouse, taking questions from the Nationals’ booth.

“I felt like we got the most genuine version of a player,” Frandsen said, “and I love that.”

Bailey said the Nationals wanted their broadcasts to better measure up against the sport’s “gold standard,” pointing to national broadcasts of postseason games. “People expect to see more,” she said.

So the Nationals and MLB have given them more angles to see. There was the drone footage in the team’s home opener, which Nationals officials hope they can clear for a midsummer return. (As it turns out, flying drones in the nation’s capital invites plenty of red tape.) The team could also incorporate a “dirt cam” and an umpire-mounted camera, both of which MLB makes available for broadcasts.

But Frandsen’s favorite new toy is the “Wire Cam,” which Bailey said has universal implementation across MLB Local Media productions. Overlooking the infield, it glides from third base to home plate, offering an almost cinematic perspective as players round the bases and the ball’s relayed home.

“We’re not doing the old broadcast,” Frandsen said. “So get used to the new broadcast. Because it’s going to be fun. ... It’s going to give you a new perspective on what really is the new MLB umbrella.”

“An embarrassment of riches,” Datt said of the team’s new technologies.

And a breath of fresh air. Frandsen said he was treated well when he worked for MASN, whose Orioles broadcasts provide most, if not all, of the on-air features now touted on Nationals.TV.

But he acknowledged that “it wasn’t the best of relationships” between the Nationals and MASN. Last year, the Orioles and Nationals ended a lengthy legal fight over television rights fees associated with the network, with the Nationals receiving an unspecified settlement.

Now, Frandsen said, he feels he has more of a voice in shaping responsive game coverage.

“You actually don’t feel like you’re silent in the whole thing,” he said. “You’re like, ‘Oh, someone actually heard it.’”

Bailey said getting Nationals.TV off the ground was “probably the easiest” programming launch in her three decades of broadcasting, though some fans were unable to access the team’s new broadcast channel during the Nationals’ season-opening series.

The on-field product hasn’t been bad to watch, either; Washington (9-10), widely projected to be one of the worst teams in baseball, is tied for second in the competitive National League East three weeks into the season. Shortstop CJ Abrams and right fielder James Wood rank among the league leaders in home runs and RBIs, powering one of baseball’s most explosive offenses.

On Friday, an even wider audience will get a look at the new-look Nationals. Fox 5 DC will simulcast their series opener against the San Francisco Giants, the first of 10 regular-season games on Nationals.TV to be shared as part of an over-the-air partnership. The response so far, Nationals broadcasters and officials say, has been overwhelmingly positive.

“I think we’re kind of paving a road here, and it’s kind of a crawl-walk-run situation,” Kolko said. “And we’re in the crawling stage. We’re maybe starting to stand. And hopefully, as we get deeper and deeper into the season, we can start walking, and then sprinting, and rolling out a lot more of this stuff to make our broadcasts feel bigger.”

Banner reporter Andrew Golden contributed to this story.