WWE and Netflix were doing the brand synergy thing last night (March 25) as Major League Baseball opened its 2026 regular season with a primetime game on the streaming giant. The New York Yankees visit to Oracle Park to face the San Francisco Giants gave us our first glimpse of John Cena doing part of his new, post-retirement job for WWE. In this case, that involved selling MLB’s new Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System as a performance enhancing innovation over Metallica interspersed with clips
from his in-ring career… parts of which you can stream on Netflix in the United States, and most of which is on the service for the rest of the globe.
If you don’t want a fun part of Apple’s Pluribus spoiled for you, skip to the next paragraph… but those of us in the Cageside “offices” who’ve watched the first season of Vince Gilligan’s new show got a kick out of Cena’s charm once again being used to explain something controversial. If you never plan to watch Pluribus and want to know what we’re joking around about, watch this. Anyway…
WWE was also represented by The Usos. Well, and Uso anyway. Jey was with cousin Jacob Fatu rather than his brother Jimmy as advertised.
That Fatu for Uso swap, and Heisman Trophy-winning NFL journeyman quarterback Jameis Winston hogging Jacob and Jey’s scene with his Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson impersonation weren’t the only the only weird things about the Bay Area Samoan delegation. Jey was also without his WWE World Tag Team championship belt…
You may recall, there was much confusion about The Usos match against The Vision’s Logan Paul and Austin Theory on Raw this past Monday (March 23). WWE went back-and-forth about whether the match would be for Jimmy & Jey’s titles. One explanation for why The Vision duo’s disqualification loss ended up being non-title was so the champs could bing the straps to the game for their appearance on Netflix. Apparently that was miscommunicated about or got confused somewhere along the way, too.
The Yankees shut out the home team to win by a touchdown, by the way.
Thoughts on WWE and Netflix’s first joint foray into the grand old game?
