Where are they now: Sweeny Murti, a former Yankees reporter at WFAN

After 30 years at WFAN, including the final 22 as the station’s Yankees reporter, Sweeny Murti found himself looking for “the next adventure,” as he put it in a farewell social media post.

It was January 2023 and WFAN no longer wanted to spend the money to have a full-time reporter cover the Yankees or Mets. Murti decided it was time to move on.

So I have some news. Today is my last day at WFAN: pic.twitter.com/gGs2BlHmQQ

— Sweeny Murti (@SweenyMurti) January 20, 2023

But what was his next adventure going to be?

Two months later, Murti was hired to be the managing editor in social media for MLB Media. His official title is senior contributor and his duties are far-reaching. He creates, he posts, he reports, he writes, he edits. He contributes.

“Nobody really sees my face or hears my voice anymore,” Murti, 56, told Newsday in a telephone interview. “But my fingerprints are on a lot of the things that we post here.”

Murti’s fingerprints are all over a YouTube show called “No Easy Outs.” The show features interviews with players — and super-cool animation — and is geared toward kids. It is in its second season on MLB’s YouTube kid-centered channel MLB Clubhouse.

An episode featuring Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. premieres on Saturday. Future episodes will spotlight former Mets first baseman Pete Alonso and Padres reliever Mason Miller. Edwin Diaz, then of the Mets, was one of three players interviewed in 2025 along with Andrew McCutchen and Steven Kwan.

Murti narrated the first season, but the decision was made to go without a narrator this year so the players' voices could be more prominent as they speak into the camera (hopefully directly to the kids watching).

The idea for the show was Murti’s. Or, more accurately, his wife’s.

“When I was interviewing for the position here, one of the ideas that I threw out there was one that my wife has been telling me for a while,” he said. “She's an elementary school librarian, and she's been telling me for a while that the podcast space for kids is lacking for sports podcasts. A lot of them just are made for adults. They have lots of profanity in them and things like that. I pitched this idea during my interview process — a podcast geared for kids — and that caught the attention of one of the people here as I was being brought on.”

The title “No Easy Outs” is meant to reflect that this show (it graduated from a podcast) isn’t about the players’ successes but their struggles, especially any they may have had while growing up or when they were in the minor leagues.

“I covered a lot of great players, and what made them great wasn't that they didn't fail,” Murti said. “What made them great is they knew how to handle failure, and that's just what baseball's all about . . . So this idea of overcoming failure and teaching kids that these lessons are there in baseball, I wanted to go back and find them. We wanted to make them relatable to kids. So don't talk about whatever failures we had in the major leagues. Let's go back and find something you had growing up to deal with and make that relatable because the issues of confidence and fitting in and all those things are kind of universal to kids.”

You might be shocked to learn, for example, that Chisholm had a lovely singing voice as a child, and that he didn’t feel as if he fit in while growing up in the Bahamas because of his love of anime, or that when he was a minor-leaguer, it took a pep talk from a then-Marlins front office executive named Derek Jeter to help boost his confidence.

One issue in putting that episode together, Murti said, was that he couldn’t assume the target audience was familiar with Jeter.

“In one of the first cuts, he mentions Derek Jeter, and we kind of move along in the story,” Murti said. “And I said, 'I think we have to stop here and tell people who Derek Jeter was because I'm showing this to a 10-year-old.’ So we went back and we put in this little highlight package of Derek Jeter to say, ‘OK, this is who he's talking about.’ ”

The main part of Murti’s job at WFAN for his final 22 years there was talking about Jeter and the rest of the Yankees. When his time at the station ended, Murti, as he put it, “just wasn't interested in being my own brand,” so he didn’t set out to start a podcast or anything like that, as a lot of former WFAN hosts have.

Murti was looking for a job. He found one, one that allows him to still have a voice, even if it is without a microphone.

“I took this and said, ‘I don't have a better option right now. This feels like a really good thing for me to do and try,’ ” Murti said. “I liked what it could do for my home and family life. This was no longer about what can it do for my career.

“Here we are: This is my fourth season here. Been here 3 1/2 years. This has been a really good career move . . . I like being a small part of a big machine, like what WFAN was. I think I get to do that here, too. I'm a small part of a very big machine.”