It might be your only way of seeing Fred Lynn or Mike Schmidt outside of the playoffs or World Series. Before cable television, your local team was broadcasting a few games and then there was the nationally broadcast “Game of the Week.” Unless you were in one of four markets that had an American and National league team, the weekly national game meant seeing a team that your local team would never play. The feeling was attendance would decline and this was where the teams made their money, at the gate. Please get rid of the box.įrom the late 1940s until the late 1970s baseball teams were reluctant to broadcast games. God forbid you remove all the humanity of the game. You know we’re heading towards eliminating umpires. The umpire disagrees a fair amount of the time from what the box shows anyhow. TBS – Do you really need to know where each previous pitch “kind of” wasĩ9% of people can distinguish what a strike is versus a ball without a box. ( UPDATE 2018 – YES now has the dreaded box.) The Yankees YES network is thankfully one of the few holdouts to the box. ![]() Instead it has cancerously spread from networks to local broadcasts. I erroneously thought the box would end like Fox’s failed ridiculous blue illuminated hockey pucks. Come on! Here’s a thought – maybe if you can’t distinguish that that pitch in the dirt was a ball and not a strike, baseball may not be the sport for you.īaseball broadcasts have become one big video game. There are also sometimes video trails of the pitch crossing the plate on replay. It obscures your view to varying degrees depending upon which network is broadcasting the game and the particulars of their box. The worst part about it is you can’t ignore it. Unfortunately it is in the direct line of sight of the television viewer. 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. And it’s getting to be de rigueur instead of a special feature. With the exception of a few local broadcast outlets, most networks televising baseball have adapted their own version of a strike zone box. How did people enjoy the first 40 years of baseball telecasts with just having the game and nothing else on the screen? Quite well.Ĭheck out a random pre-1980 baseball broadcast on Youtube to see what I mean.ģ – The damn box superimposed around home plate Go watch a game from the 1980’s or earlier. 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? Watching the World Series there are no other scores or news to scroll on the screen so you won’t see the scroll there. While not every channel is guilty of the news scroll on the bottom of the screen, your view is still cluttered with unnecessary information. 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. Both of these camera angles are more conducive and infinitely superior to the view you see on most broadcasts. So here are two angles from behind the plate – one high and wide the other not as high. 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. Nor should it be the way to televise one. 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. How would we know? The audience rarely sees any other part of the field except from the center field camera. ![]() 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? What you are seeing is four guys – a pitcher’s back, a catcher, a batter and an umpire. Guess what? About 80% of the time you’re not watching baseball. None of the corrective suggestions will be heeded, but someone has to point it out. Here are just a few of the ways television has helped to ruin watching baseball. Watching the game from center field – the only way an entire generation of TV director’s have decided to televise baseball
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