How Television Has Helped To Ruin Baseball

Watching the game from center field – the only way an entire generation of TV director’s have decided to televise baseball

Here are just a few of the ways television has helped to ruin watching baseball. None of the corrective suggestions will be heeded, but someone has to point it out.

1 – The camera angles

Guess what? About 80% of the time you’re not watching baseball. What you are seeing is four guys – a pitcher’s back, a catcher, a batter and an umpire.

What kind of a lead is the runner taking? Where are the outfielders shaded? Is the overused shift in effect? Where was that ball hit? Is it going to be a hit?

How would we know? The audience rarely sees any other part of the field except from the center field camera.

Unless you attend games in person and sit in center field with a high power telescope, this is not the way anyone views an entire baseball game. Nor should it be the way to televise one.

It would be nice to see the return of the overhead mezzanine high camera from behind the catcher so we can see the whole field.

So here are two angles from behind the plate – one high and wide the other not as high. Both of these camera angles are more conducive and infinitely superior to the view you see on most broadcasts.

2- The busy screen

I don’t know about most people but I want to watch a baseball game, not be diverted by ads and a constant scroll of information.

While not every channel is guilty of the news scroll on the bottom of the screen, your view is still cluttered with unnecessary information.

Watching the World Series there are no other scores or news to scroll on the screen so you won’t see the scroll there. Yet that doesn’t stop clutter.

Showing “Fox World Series Game 1” in the upper right hand portion of the screen for the ENTIRE game? Does the score, runners on base, balls and strikes, number of pitches, pitch speed and all other sorts of information need to be shown every second of the game?

Go watch a game from the 1980’s or earlier. How did people enjoy the first 40 years of baseball telecasts with just having the game and nothing else on the screen? Quite well.

Check out a random pre-1980 baseball broadcast on Youtube to see what I mean.

3 – The damn box superimposed around home plate

With the exception of a few local broadcast outlets, most networks televising baseball have adapted their own version of a strike zone box. And it’s getting to be de rigueur instead of a special feature.

This horrible innovation that began a few years ago is an artificial rectangular box on the TV screen surrounding home plate, that supposedly identifies the strike zone and differentiates strikes from balls. Unfortunately it is in the direct line of sight of the television viewer.

The worst part about it is you can’t ignore it. Continue reading →