What's wrong with this picture?
Modest proposals on how TV might showcase baseball better. Plus a post-election update on the A's ballpark, and why Bob Lemon became Jim Lemon.
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This will be our last newsletter until January.
The A’s lose one ally and potentially another
Once upon a time, Oakland was home to teams in each of the four major sports leagues — the NHL Seals, NFL Raiders, NBA Warriors, and MLB A’s.
Only the A’s are left, and whether or not they stay in Oakland is likely to be decided by the incoming mayor and city council.
As of this writing, officials are still counting votes in the mayor’s race, 10 days after the election.
No matter the outcome of the mayor’s race, the A’s lost their biggest backer for getting financial support for their concept of a ballpark and entertainment district at Howard’s Terminal. The current mayor, Libby Schaaf, won’t be back because of term limits. The two candidates vying for the mayor’s job, Sheng Thao and Loren Taylor, have been non-commital about the city providing money for the project. Same with almost all of the incoming council.
The Athletics have another possibility for a home — Las Vegas. There was bad news for the team on that front, too. Joe Lombardo narrowly defeated incumbent Steve Sisolak for governor. Sisolak was a big backer of spending money for a ballpark. He supported spending $750 million to build the Raiders’ stadium.
Lombardo hasn’t made his position on subsidizing a ballpark for the baseball team.
Split the difference
Baseball would televise much better by relying more on a technique that has been around almost as long as there have been moving pictures.
Imagine for a moment that a quarterback — we’ll say Patrick Mahomes — is facing a third and long, deep in his own territory, trailing by three points late in the fourth quarter of a playoff game.
Mahomes rolls out, winds up, and throws a long pass. We can tell it’s a long pass from the trajectory. The announcer tells us: “He’s going for broke . . . ‘‘ But instead of seeing the ball in flight, we see Mahomes hopping around and looking downfield.
The announcer tells us “It looks like he has a man open in the end zone. . .”
Finally. the camera cuts for a shot of the receiver taking up most of the frame, landing after leaping and pulling down the ball. “Touchdown!”
Exciting? Sure, especially if you are a Chiefs fan. But that would not be not quite as good as the view we are used to — tracking the ball from when it leaves the quarterback's hand, watching the pass travel through the air, revealing that the receiver is open and how close the defenders are, then showing the catch.
I bring this up in baseball we often get the second version. If you watch the video above, starting at the 4:17 mark, you can see what I mean.
It is TV . . . with a side order of radio thrown in.
The Phillies are down 3-2 in the eighth inning of Game 5 of the NLCS. Padres reliever Robert Suarez throws a 99 mph fastball Bryce Harper hits. You can see Harper makes good contact. You can see from Harper’s reaction that he is pleased with the result. Play-by-play announcer Joe Davis is going nuts. Then, almost four seconds later, we see the crowd beyond the left field fence waiting for the ball to come down.
Exciting? Sure, especially if you are a Phillies fan. But we really don’t get to track the flight of the ball (only later with replays).
It is TV . . . with a side order of radio thrown in.
And that is too often what we get.
Baseball is a challenging sport for TV
Back in the early 1990s, I was sitting in the stands in Anaheim Stadium on a weekday afternoon, watching the Brewers play the Angels. Robin Yount was positioned in shallow centerfield. An Angels hitter — I don’t remember who it was — launched a drive over Yount’s head.
Yount was off at the crack of the bat. He turned his back to home plate, raced to where he thought the ball was headed, turned his head, and caught the ball over his shoulder without breaking stride. It didn’t make any highlight reels and was a fairly routine play for a fielder of Yount’s ability.
And yet it was an incredibly athletic play.
It was a play that could not be truly captured live for a baseball telecast, and it serves to illustrate the challenge of televising baseball.
A lot of ground to cover
Unlike our other major team sports, baseball is played on an expansive field. One camera angle doesn’t work for all the action.
In football, basketball, and hockey you can basically shoot from up high from the sideline and give the audience a great view of the action. Other camera angles are supplemental, for reactions, to isolate a player or group of players (often for replay), or just to give another angle for the sake of variety.
But baseball is spread out.
According to The Physics Factbook, a baseball playing field covers 9,812 square meters or 105,615.5 square feet. The playing field for football is 57,600 square feet.
In a traditional alignment in baseball, the defenders are spread out. The distance between a centerfielder and the catcher is often close to 400 feet.
And there is more. A baseball is small — much smaller than a football or a basketball — and it moves faster. And a batted ball isn’t aimed, and it goes off in odd directions.
And finally, the relevant action is often far apart. The ball is in the outfield, for instance, and the lead runner is rounding third.
This is where modern telecasts come up needlessly short.
Two images are better than one
Most telecasts of modern MLB games use eight cameras in an effort to capture the action live for the viewers. For big games, such as the All-Star Game and the World Series, Fox likes to use as many as 23, including some for worm’s-eye-view around the bases and home plate.
Beyond just getting the shot, baseball poses another challenge for the TV crew. Relevant action is often going on in two or more places at once and hundreds of feet apart. In football, the relevant action — for most fans — is around the ball.
In baseball, the director has to choose the view — in real-time.
If the problem is that one camera can’t capture everything, then the obvious solution is to show more than one shot at a time.
Baseball telecasts should rely more on a technique that directors have had available for live sports for longer than I have been alive. Which is a long time.
The split screen was first used for “Santa Clause,” a 1-minute and 16-second film made in Great Britain in 1898.
There were numerous examples in silent films. And once the pictures got sound, well, Hollywood in its Golden Age could hardly show a phone conversation without the audience being able to see both parties
I have not been able to find out when the split screen came to live sports. But when Don Larsen of the Yankees pitched his perfect game against the Dodgers in the 1956 World Series, the network split screen of Larsen being mobbed on one half and a cutout mug on the other.
I remember NBC using the split screen regularly on the Game of the Week in the late 1960s. It was primarily used when there was a runner on first who was a threat to steal.
And on the last Saturday of the 1968 season, NBC did something revolutionary with the split screen. It was the final year before division play. Both pennant races had been decided. That was the Year of the Pitcher — and the two pitchers of the year were Denny McLain, on the soon-to-be AL champion Tigers, and Bob Gibson, on the soon-to-be champion Cardinals. McLain had won 30 games that season. Gibson was on his way to compiling a 1.16 ERA.
McLain and Gibson were pitching that day, and NBC showed both games using the split screen.
The split screen of course is still used — it just hasn’t been taken much further.
TV can throw a commercial while the action is still going. And networks use it to show one of those god-awful in-game interviews with the manager in the middle of an at-bat. (On-field reporter: “Your starting pitcher has looked good so far but finds himself trailing 3-2 after six innings.” Manager: “Yeah, except for the two mistakes he made that got hit out of the park, he’s been solid.” On-field reporter: “He’s at 80 pitches. How long do you think he can go?” Manager: “Probably about 20 more pitches, then we’ll turn it over to the ’pen. We have a lot of confidence in the guys there.”)
And sometimes it is used to heighten the drama. In the at-bat with Harper facing Suarez, Fox split the screen to show both players’ faces.
More splits
So how could it be used better? The possibilities are numerous.
I will give a couple of examples. We’ll start with what I think is the modern egregious shortcoming in the modern baseball telecast.
When a runner is coming — or going to third — I want to see where the ball is as well as where the runner is. So I prefer a distant shot that shows the outfielder and the runner. For whatever reason, about 15 or 20 years ago, directors on baseball telecasts fell in love with a tight shot of the runner heading to home or third. But if you insist on that tight shot, a split screen would work.
Instead of this:
Maybe something along the lines of this:
Could we see where the fielders are positioned?
In 1958, the centerfield camera was introduced. For more than a decade, that shot vied with the top-down shot from the second deck and what I like to call the umpire’s-and-catcher’s . . . uh . . . backside shot before TV settled on using the centerfield shot the default shot before each pitch.
By the early 1970s, TV people figured out centerfield camera provides the best angle for watching the battle between batter and pitcher. And was made even better when the strike-zone box that ESPN debuted in 2000.
Now our second-guessing the umpire’s balls-and-strikes calls are educated second guesses.
But there is one major drawback to this view. We can’t see where the fielders are positioned.
Except for the early days of the over-shift trend, we seldom have been shown how the defense is positioned. You know there is often a lot of what photographers call dead space in the centerfield shot of home plate.
Instead of this
Maybe we could have this:
Guys standing around
Finally, Baseball usually gets dinged for too much standing around. A study by the Wall Street Journal in 2013 showed there are only 18 minutes of actual action in an MLB game. But the same study showed the NFL gives us 11 minutes of action.
I think we would all agree that TV does a better job of filling the non-action parts of football games.
With the pitch clock that MLB has adopted, we should have a little less standing around. But the game won’t turn into pinball on a baseball diamond.
Just a thought: Maybe we don’t need to see the pitcher rub the ball, gather himself, and toe the rubber with every darned pitch.
How could the idiot baseball writers pick these guys? And other things about MLB (and a 19th-century photographic process) you should know
Reference material: Joe Posnanski has an interesting take on how most of the questionable Hall of Fame selections came from various special committees and not the baseball writers. One thing to keep in mind: No matter who was choosing players for the Hall, the research tools available were meager until relatively recently.
Who was eligible to vote? The writers always have been the main selectors. The BBWAA began voting on potential inductees in 1936, three years before the first induction ceremony. Not every BBWAA member could — or can — vote. To be eligible to vote on the Hall of Fame, a writer had to have covered baseball for at least 10 seasons and seen at least 100 games in those seasons. Well, you don’t need to watch 1,000 games to go research who has the best batting averages. So I think the voting system was set up to have experienced writers render judgments in a large part based on having seen the candidates they were considering.
Available stats: Obviously, there were no Internet sites. The scribes were flying mostly, but not completely, blind when it came to statistical information. In 1934, The Sporting News began publishing Daguerreotypes, which gave season-by-season stats for famous, retired stars. So for the players The Sporting News included, the writers had some numbers to back up what they’d seen.
What is a daguerreotype? A large image of each player was published with their statistical info. A daguerreotype is a kind of photo, but the images The Sporting News used were not actual daguerreotypes. According to Encyclopedia Britannica is a type of photograph in which an image forms after a piece of copper coated with silver is exposed to light. The image becomes permanent when salt is applied. Named after Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, who was involved in coming up with the process, daguerreotype photos were widely used in the mid-19th century.
First true reference: There was no comprehensive book with all the players — or all the players the researchers could find records for — until 1951 when the “Official Encyclopedia of Baseball” by Hy Turkin and Sherley Clark Thompson was published. It had barebones career stats for individual players. As I recall, it listed batting averages, games played, and home runs. For pitchers, I think the categories were won-lost records and ERA and maybe innings pitched each season.
Computer age: In 1969, the first edition of “The Baseball Encyclopedia” appeared, utilizing computer technology to create a massive database. This was the “first book ever typeset from a computer,” one of the authors, John Thorn, writes. It contained extensive stats on individual players in traditional categories such as triples, slugging, and on-base percentages. “The Baseball Encyclopedia” evolved into “The Total Baseball Encyclopedia,” by Thorn and Pete Palmer in 1989. Total Baseball introduced total average, a sort of forerunner of Wins Above Replacement.
Baseball-reference: Baseball-reference went online in 2000, working off the Total Baseball data. In 2010, the site began publishing Wins Above Replacement, which became a game-changer for fans and media, especially when it comes to arguments about the Hall of Fame. Posnanski implies this, but I will state it clearly: It isn’t fair to complain about the election of a player with a low career WAR that was made before WAR was invented. The voters were not idiots for electing pitcher Bob Lemon in 1975 with only 37.5 WAR in his career. The guy won 20 games seven times and racked up 207 career wins in a relatively short career, had a winning percentage of .618, and was a star in the 1948 World Series, the last time the team then known as the Indians won the Fall Classic. The writers were looking at the stats by which all starting pitchers were judged at that time.
Two Bob Lemons was one too many: For a short time, Bob Lemon was teammates with an outfielder named Jim Lemon. Until he was signed by the team then known as the Indians, Jim Lemon was Bob Lemon. James Lemon’s middle name was Robert and he had been called Bob for most of his life. The team thought two Bob Lemons would cause confusion.
Jim Lemon in popular culture: Jim Lemon was traded to the Washington Senators in 1954. In the movie “Quiz Show” there is a scene where some young government lawyers are reading the morning newspapers. One reads an item:
''Although the crowd was cordoned off at a distance of a hundred yards . . . an unidentified Venezuelan struck Nixon in the head with a thrown onion.
“Wow. The Senators should sign that guy. Jim Lemon can’t hit the cutoff man. This guy throws a strike . . . with an onion.”
Topps had to ship that card immediately so that when I bought the pack with Lemon’s card in it in May, the stick of bubble gum would be stale enough to disintegrate instantly in my mouth, providing a full Topps experience.
Tears: Jim Lemon was the manager of the Senators in 1968. Topps put a baseball card of with Lemon as the manager for the 1969 season. But the Senators dumped Lemon late in the off-season. I guess it happened too late to pull the card but not too late for a hasty update. Topps had to ship that card immediately so that when I bought the pack with Lemon’s card in it in May, the stick of bubble gum would be stale enough to disintegrate instantly in my mouth, providing a full Topps experience. On the back of Lemon’s card was a cartoon character in a baseball uniform streaming tears with a note that Lemon was fired as manager in January. That, sadly, is what I will always remember about Jim Lemon, a two-time All-Star with the Senators.
From two Turners to no Turners: The Dodgers declined the option for next season on Justin Turner, who didn’t find success at the MLB level until the Dodgers found him. Shortstop Trea Turner had already opted for free agency. So it is likely both Turners, who held down the left side of the Dodgers infield for the past season-and-a-half, will be moving on. MLB trade rumors point out that although Justin Turner is heading into his age 38 season, and showed decline early in 2022 before righting the ship, there are few free-agent options at third base.
Mattress Mack the publisher: Like many other subscribers to the Houston Chronicle, I was saddened by the news that venerable sports columnist John Mclain was leaving the paper. (Yes I live in a suburb of Phoenix and have no connection to Houston, but I subscribe to the paper online.) However, McClain is back courtesy of Mattress Mack, whose real name is Jim McIngvale. McIngvale owns Gallery Furniture, which operates three big stores in the Houston area and apparently does a whopping business online. He was already famous in the Bayou City, but he became well-known outside of his home base for cashing multimillion-dollar bets on the Astros when they won the World Series. In September, the furniture impresario decided to try his hand at a sports news site that covers teams in Texas and Louisiana. Called Gallery Sports, the staff includes former Chronicle scribes McClain and Richard Justice. “I’ve always had an interest in sports and my son (James) and I like content that will drive customers to Gallery Furniture,” McIngvale said. “We thought sports was a perfect way to connect with our customers and with all the sports fans in Houston.”
Best pitcher and best hitter are available: Justin Verlander’s decision to decline his option for next season with the Astros creates an unusual situation. Both the best pitcher and the hitter (Aaron Judge) from last season are available on the open market. There was speculation — perhaps wishful thinking — that the best combo pitcher/ hitter, Shohei Ohtani, might be available for a trade, but Angels GM Perry Minasian has said poured water on those hot rumors.
Not a great look: Baseball has a sponsorship deal with FTX to have the umpires wear the company logo on their shirts and jackets. Probably not the best look for the Arizona Fall League championship game, which came right after the cryptocurrency trader melted down, saw its CEO resign, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (that’s the kind where the company to pay off creditors by reorganizing, not the kind where the company liquidates and closes shop). The deal started in the middle of the 2021 season and runs for five years. Oddly no one seems to have reported how much FTX agreed to pay MLB.
FTX player endorsements: Shohei Ohtani and David Ortiz had marketing deals with FTX. No numbers were made public, but it was reported that both received compensation in bitcoin and equity in FTX. Well, the equity is gone. And a lot of bitcoin is missing. They can take solace in this — they aren’t getting sued. Tom Brady, Steph Curry, and the Golden State Warriors have been named in a multi-billion dollar class-action suit. Ohtani and Ortiz have not. So far.
The year of these pitchers: The Astros’ Justin Verlander won the AL Cy Young and the Marlins’ Sandy Alcantara won the NL Cy Young; both were unanimous. That is the first time that has happened since 1968 — The Year of the Pitcher — when Denny McLain and Bob Gibson won. Though offense was down this season, it was nothing like 1968. That year, the AL average ERA was 2.98. McLain had an ERA of 1.96. Verlander’s ERA this season was 1.75. The AL average was 3.88.
Great deal for the D-backs: The Cardinals first baseman Paul Goldschmidt won the NL MVP award— four seasons after the D-backs traded him to avoid signing him to a long-term contract or losing him with no compensation. The D-backs got:
Catcher Carson Kelly, who has slashed .231/.318/.405 with an OPS of .723.
Luke Weaver, an injury-prone pitcher who the D-Backs traded last summer; they acquired Emmanuel Rivera, who slashed .227/.304/.424 with a .728 OPS on39 games with Arizona.
Andrew Young, a light-hitting infielder who appeared in 70s games in two seasons with the D-Backs and was released last winter.
A compensation pick that turned into Dominic Fletcher, a good contact hitter with some pop who has played in Tripe-A Reno this past season
Here are Goldy’s stats with the Cardinals:
This was a deal for the D-backs did for the long-term benefits that actually worked well in the first year and keeps looking worse and worse.
Meanwhile, the D-backs have been sorely lacking in consistent offensive production at first base.
In another town, D-backs GM Mike Hazen might be feeling the heat, but I think he is in no immediate danger.
He lost his wife last summer after a two-year battle with brain cancer. She was 45. I think everyone feels some sympathy for his situation.
And I think the fan base here is . . . well, you can call it less passionate or more patient than in other places.