All The Smoke Productions has spent the last several years making clear it does not intend to stay in its lane. The production company founded by former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson launched out of Showtime’s collapse, landed a high seven-figure deal with DraftKings, moved to Meadowlark Media before eventually outgrowing that partnership too, turned down a Netflix offer that didn’t meet their terms, and built a combat sports vertical from scratch with All The Smoke Fight. The next frontier is baseball.
According to Front Office Sports, All The Smoke Productions launched a baseball vertical on Wednesday called ATS Baseball, with the debut podcast ATS Dugout set to release more than 20 episodes throughout the baseball season. Barnes will co-host alongside a rotating cast of former MLB All-Stars in Nick Swisher and Chris Young, with Hall of Famer CC Sabathia — who grew up an hour from Barnes in Northern California and now serves as an ambassador for MLB through the Commissioner’s Ambassador Program — having been All The Smoke’s first baseball guest and the one who recommended both co-hosts. Sabathia will also be in the booth for Netflix’s production of Yankees-Giants next week, alongside Matt Vasgersian and Hunter Pence.
After retiring from a 12-year playing career that included a 2009 World Series ring with the Yankees and a 2010 All-Star selection, Swisher joined Fox Sports as a studio analyst in 2017. He had previously worked Fox’s postseason coverage as far back as the 2014 World Series — while he was still an active player — before the full-time studio role materialized. Swisher is no longer with Fox Sports, but did make an appearance on FS1’s First Things First as recently as last summer. Young, meanwhile, has been one of MLB Network’s analysts since 2021 — a 13-year playing career capped by an All-Star selection of his own in 2010 for Arizona — and was one of the early participants in MLBN’s Clubhouse Edition format, a more conversational alternate broadcast that CC Sabathia helped drive and that featured Young alongside Sabathia on multiple occasions.
“I knew Swish when he played for the A’s, and I was with the Warriors,” Barnes told FOS. “That’s when I got a chance to meet him and just [had] great energy every time. I always remembered that. So when we started throwing names around, we met with MLB, and then CC was really high on C.Y. My first time meeting him was actually at the spring training stuff we did in Arizona, and [he was] a consummate professional, really knows his shit, and I was really impressed with him. I thought it was a great balance being able to have the opportunity to work with both those guys.”
When Barnes appeared on The Rich Eisen Show last June and teased that Major League Baseball had invited All The Smoke to the 2025 MLB All-Star Game in Atlanta, he hinted at this becoming a possibility. The impulse to go bigger in baseball came from the audience before it came from any formal strategy. According to FOS, episodes featuring former MLB players — including one with Gary Sheffield — generated strong numbers and engagement well above the baseline for the flagship basketball show, which All The Smoke COO Brian Dailey told the outlet made the case for a dedicated vertical.
Barnes himself played baseball through 11th grade before committing fully to basketball, and the guests he’s already sat down with for the new show — Eric Davis and Kenny Lofton, among others — are players whose careers predated the media infrastructure that exists today. That’s the same gap All The Smoke filled on the basketball side, and if the audience engagement that drove this decision in the first place is any indication, baseball fans have been waiting for someone to fill it.