BASEBALL ON TV

This is as good a time as any to talk about baseball on TV.  Jonathan Mahler's piece in the Sept. 29th NY Times referred to the low TV ratings of baseball as showing how "irrelevant" baseball has become.  First of all, so what?  Baseball has its beauties that don't appeal to everyone, just as ballet does.  What difference does that make?  But I also think that one needs to discuss, as Mahler did not, how poorly baseball is televised. 

Several years ago Fox showed a baseball game as it was televised in the fifties and each decade since.  Their point, apparently, was how much better it is now, with instant replays and statistics.  What it demonstrated to me, however, was how much better it was televised in the fifties!  In those days they used two cameras, one high behind home plate and one high down the left field line, and one could see the arc of the ball and the movement on the diamond.  Among the problems with how baseball is shown today:

1. Most shots are telephoto shots from the camera in centerfield, presumably so they can show digital ads behind the batter.  Not only does this hideously distort the distance between the pitcher and the batter, it also leaves one ignorant of what is going on elsewhere on the field.  They even have to use a diagram on the top left of the screen to let you know if there on people on base, rather like the diagrams at department stores before even radio, that updated you on what was happening.

2. Too many close-ups.  Baseball is not about close-ups; like comedy it is played out in long shot.  Why constantly show close-ups of scruffy players grimacing and spitting?.  There are also too many irrelevant shots of the dugout and the stands, though at least now we are spared the shots of wives that used to be a staple of ABC broadcasts in the Howard Cosell days.

3. Related to the close-ups is the discontinuity:  we see the batter hit it and then we see a cut to the fielder making the play, completing separating the relationship between the two.  If we ever even see the arc of the ball to the outfield we see it in a replay, which brings up:

4. The lack of immediacy.  Andrew Sarris once said that the reason most baseball movies are not good is because much of the beauty of baseball is its immediacy (I will be eventually writing about baseball movies); on TV the constant showing of replays destroys the immediacy.  The use of replays has gotten so out of hand that one sometimes even loses track of whether one is seeing the actual game or a replay!

5.  These are some of the visual problems and they are not helped by the audio.  What is the point of having announcers, other than the job (which should be unnecessary) of telling you what you can't see because the camera is showing only the pitcher and batter, such as someone trying to steal a base? Do we need an announcer to say, when there is a runner on second base, that there is someone in scoring position? If anything, they should at least be explaining the things that most people don't understand:  how ERA and slugging percentage are computed, what is a hit-and-run play and what is its purpose, what the infield fly rule is, etc.

In short, baseball on TV is spatially and conceptually confusing to those who don't know much about baseball and unappealing to those who do.  I prefer baseball on the radio, where if the announcers are good (which too often these days they are not) one can see it in the mind's eye.