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MLB Network builds studio for new a.m. show

MLB Network is building a new studio down the street from its Secaucus, N.J., offices from where it will launch a live morning show next season.

Channel executives have not picked a name or on-air talent for the three-hour show, which plans an Opening Day 2015 debut. Current plans are to have the show run from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., leading into Chris Russo’s “High Heat.”

“This is part of our overall strategy [of increasing live hours],” said Tony Petitti, MLB Network’s president and CEO. “Any time that we’ve increased the live portion of our day, we’ve been successful in attracting a bigger audience.”

Since its 2009 launch, MLB Network has run the late-night show “Quick Pitch” on a loop throughout the morning. Petitti’s vision of the planned morning show will be somewhere between the irreverence of “Intentional Talk” and the hard-core focus of “MLB Tonight.” He wants the new show to have personality while discussing the day’s storylines.

“‘Quick Pitch’ gets us through the early morning hours really well,” Petitti said. “But by 10 a.m., it makes a lot of sense for us to start getting topical again.”

When the channel launched nearly six years ago, Petitti focused on building up its prime-time programming with “MLB Tonight.”

Eventually, the former CBS Sports executive “worked backwards,” adding live hours in the late and early afternoon. Eventually, he expects to expand the morning show to 8 a.m. ET or earlier.

“That’s the direction we’ve been going,” he said. “For now, we felt a good thing to do is work from our last live show and work backwards. We felt that adding three hours was more than enough.”

Pettiti referenced “SportsCenter,” which went live on ESPN in the mornings starting in 2010, as a model for live studio programming. Petitti said the move to go live in the mornings will make MLB Network more nimble in covering news that breaks overnight.

The new set currently is being built in an abandoned warehouse just 100 yards away from MLB Network’s Secaucus, N.J., office. Ultimately, the new building will house a production facility and offices.

“To really make the morning show look different, it needed its own home,” Petitti said. “If you watch ESPN throughout the day, you feel like you’re moving to different places. It’s the same idea for us.”

The two current sets — Studio 3 and Studio 42 — will continue to house most of the channel’s studio programming, such as “MLB Tonight.”

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