Multi-tasking keeps baseball simple

Sporting News, The, May 26, 2003 by Fritz Quindt

With apologies to Thomas Wolfe, who never watched the pastime from his La-Z-Boy: You can go home again. But do you want to?

Baseball especially always has been a work in TV progress, susceptible to production whims, and this spring's hot fashion is faux retro. ESPN has dubbed Wednesday night games the Living Legends Series, with Curt Gowdy as inaugural guest announcer. (Ernie Harwell and Harry Kalas will appear later, but other potential legends demurred--perhaps intimidated by the K-Zone dominating exclusively on Sunday Night Baseball.) Fox's Game of the Week, version 8.0, includes miking first basemen but also a pledge to eliminate in-booth midgame interviews (Fox Sports president Ed Goren says, "Every time we do one, it seems a game breaks out.").

And there are Mariners hometown telecasts--typically among the most elaborate, requiring eight announcers per night!--where really radical experiments are ongoing. Like, they're trying "no-replay innings" and the ol' home plate camera as the primary angle. This would qualify as a publicity stunt or a desperate gimmick, except the M's also get MLB's best ratings. Why mess with success? As new executive producer Tom Feuer observes, "Ratings don't tell you why they're watching."

In further search of truth, the middle innings of Mariners-Yankees May 8 on Fox Sports Northwest were shown text-free. No graphics, not even the hallmark Fox Box. As a paean to "interactive TV" in 2003, viewers ware urged to e-mail feedback.

These are brain children of 40-something Fetter, who previously headed NBCOlympics.com yet maintains his TV screen is cluttered. The Internet, he explains, is a "lean-forward experience. TV should be lean-backward. My preference is not to read a game but to watch it."

Such aversion partly is generational. As longtime director Sandy Grossman likes to say: "For years we wanted 'em to make the screen bigger. Now we've got big screens, and what do we do? Put all that junk on there and make the screen smaller." Watching that Mariners game, the screen indeed did seem unusually large and pure to my eyes, almost relaxed. And kinda naked.

FSNW received 2,500 messages by the sixth inning (before its server failed), with 88 percent demanding their graphics back. These were from moms who claim they're sustained by the Fox Box while they care for babies, and die-hards threatening to switch to radio if deprived of a display of what Jamie Moyer's ERA is with Safeco Field's roof open.

So the people have spoken. Never mind that graphics are an easy out, and the true test of good TV is coordination of images, commentary and direction. Watching baseball is destined to be more like watching Headline News, not The Pride of the Yankees. Happy multi-tasking.

E-mail: fquindt@sportingnews.com.