How to Fix Baseball, Part I: Use the Center Field Camera
It’s a new baseball season, and that means baseball nerds everywhere — myself included — are celebrating the return of the grand old game. It’s that ethos in baseball that serves as its greatest draw — nostalgia, pastoralism, tradition.
But Major League Baseball is in trouble. It’s getting squeezed out of the national consciousness by America’s favorite sports — football and basketball. October is no longer exclusively synonymous with the World Series — It now means the middle of football season. And MLB itself is doing itself no favors.
If baseball is to survive in its second century, it needs to adapt. Commissioner Bud Selig deserves some credit for advancing some new ideas — the Wild Card, Interleague Play, and most recently, Instant Replay, to name the biggest ones. But with his impending retirement, MLB has a chance to make itself over in a way that will ensure a place in the hearts and minds of Millennials like me.
This will not be easy. But it will be fun as a thought experiment and as a place to stir debate about how to fix some nagging idiosyncrasies of the game, and speculate on what Major League Baseball should look like in the future.
With that, here’s my first suggestion:
Re-Center Baseball’s Place on TV
Literally.
Baseball is not the most TV-friendly sport. It’s slow and not much happens. But the way we treat the game on TV could better lend itself to a more accurate representation.
This is the center field pitcher/batter view we are used to seeing on TV:
Note the offset position from dead-center field. It makes some strikes look like balls and vice-versa. In other words, it’s deceiving to the viewer. The folks at Slate have gone over this in great detail, but I’m here to reiterate it:
We need all pitcher/batter TV cameras to be in dead-center field.
Here’s what it should look like in every park:
See how much better that is? You can actually tell if a pitch is a ball or a strike. What a novel concept.
TV is about accuracy. We’ve had instant replay for years on TV broadcasts, and thankfully, MLB finally relented this year to develop a system to review pertinent calls. Yes, the system needs tweaking, but let’s not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the very good.
The one thing preventing this seems to be the lack of an ability to accommodate a gigantic TV camera in that exact position in some parks. As mentioned in the Slate article:
Matt Sandulli, who produces baseball telecasts for ESPN, says that despite the extra cost and extra effort, the network probably would’ve kept the camera “if there was a way to get the angle uniform” in every major league ballpark. As of right now, that’s not possible. In Oakland, Calif., a wall of luxury boxes precludes placing a dead-center camera. The Crown Vision center field scoreboard provides a similar obstruction in Kansas City. In Denver, the “Rock Pile” bleacher seats make installing a dead-center camera a “seat-kill,” in producer parlance. Other stadiums have advertising signage where a camera would be placed.
To which I say, rubbish. And ESPN already has the technology to fix that.
ESPN already uses remotely operated, unmanned cameras in their radio studios, and likely several other places in their vast empire. As you can see in the image at left, this device is compact and quite powerful. Why can’t this be adopted for use in baseball coverage?
It’s still strange to me that baseball would not go out of its way to make center-field cameras the standard in every park. The guys at Fangraphs have a great evaluation of each park’s camera setup. Some of them aren’t even close.
Putting one of these in every ballpark will dramatically enhance the baseball viewing experience. And this should not only be the norm for ESPN, TBS, FOX and MLB Network. It needs to be standard operating procedure for all regional networks that cover baseball live.
One of baseball’s chief issues that it must confront is making the game more appealing on TV. That means covering every angle of this complex game with as accurate a representation as possible.
This is just a smaller piece of the bigger picture I’m trying to paint here: That baseball has to buy in to TV with the same veracity that the NFL and other professional leagues have. It is the single most effective way to build its following among a younger audience that is fleeing the game for its lack of urgency and reluctance to embrace modernity.
And maybe this won’t work. But embracing technology is the first step toward enabling baseball’s resurgence as a spectator sport.
