David Cone to call more Yankees games on YES Network this season
Former Yankees and Mets pitcher and current YES Network analyst David Cone poses for a photo prior a game at Yankee Stadium on June 24, 2022. Credit: Getty Images/Mike Stobe
Good news for Yankees fans: David Cone, whose tenure at ESPN has ended, will be calling more Yankees games on the YES Network this season.
“The short answer is yes!” Cone told Newsday in a telephone interview on Saturday when asked if he will be doing more Yankees games in 2026. “Looking forward to it, very much. Probably up to 60 games to start with, I think, at this point.”
Cone, who turned 63 on Jan. 2, said he called fewer than 40 games on YES in 2025 after topping out with more than 90 a season before he got the ESPN gig.
The former Yankees and Mets pitcher just finished a four-year run as an analyst on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball.” ESPN no longer has games on Sundays; that package has been taken over by NBC, with announcers to be determined.
Will Cone be one of them?
“No, currently, no,” Cone said. “I'm really looking forward to doing more YES games right now. I'm always open to hear from somebody if they have an idea or they want to do something. Obviously, you always have open ears. But I'm really looking forward to sort of just narrowing down my schedule and doing YES games.”
ESPN will have a 30-game package in 2026, with most of the games being broadcast midweek.
“It only worked for me if it was Sunday night because that meshed with the Yankee schedule,” Cone said.
In a statement, an ESPN spokesman said: “We appreciate David’s many contributions to our Major League coverage and wish him the best.”
Of working at ESPN, Cone said: “It was a great experience. Really was fantastic. Loved everybody there. I'm a nostalgic little kid. I grew up with MTV, ESPN. I got a chance to work for them. I thought it was fantastic. It was like a dream. The people you get to work with and meet, it was a great experience, and to travel around and meet different people within the game was really a great experience as well.”
On “Sunday Night Baseball,” Cone became known nationally as an analyst with an analytical bent. It set him apart from many of the usual ex-jock announcers.
“It's been an ongoing trend when I decided to kind of educate myself when FanGraphs.com first came out, for instance, or Statcast,” he said. “To me, it's about bridging the gap between old and new school, trying to make things simple and explaining why certain things matter, why high-speed cameras matter for pitchers to design pitches and how they do it, and what's different about it nowadays as opposed to yesteryear. That's right in my wheelhouse. I love all that stuff.”
Last season’s YES booth featured Michael Kay on play-by-play plus rotating analysts including Cone, Paul O’Neill, Joe Girardi and John Flaherty. After the season, Flaherty was not offered a new contract.
Anthony Rieber covers sports media and business and professional sports (you know, games and trades and things). He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since Jan. 1, 2026.
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