NEW YORK — After the Minnesota Twins opened up a three-run lead in the top of the first inning, New York Yankees shortstop Didi Gregorius batted in the bottom half of the frame with two men on base. Twins catcher Jason Castro set up on the outside corner of the plate for the two-ball, two-strike pitch but had to stretch low and toward the inside corner to make a backhand catch of Ervin Santana’s errant fastball. Castro’s mitt tapped the ground while receiving the pitch.
To the naked eye, the pitch appeared to be an obvious ball, which was the call of home-plate umpire Alfonso Marquez. ESPN’s digitally created K-Zone, however, appeared to show the pitch nick the bottom of the strike zone, and the cable network then debuted its new digitally-rendered, three-dimensional strike zone prism — drawing on Statcast’s optical and radar tracking data — that showed the baseball piercing the lower portion of the zone at the front but exiting almost entirely below the zone in the back (thus explaining why Castro’s glove brushed the dirt).
Instead of striking out, Gregorius homered on the very next pitch to tie the game in an eventual 8-4 Yankees victory.
(Photo by Scott Clarke / ESPN Images)
The goal of concocting a digital strike zone with 3D depth is to shatter such optical illusions and reinforce the already “close to perfect” 2D K-Zone with additional detail and precision, said Phil Orlins, the senior coordinating producer for ESPN’s MLB coverage.
The 3D K-Zone was one of three innovations on display in ESPN’s wild card game coverage on Tuesday night along with eight FX microphones buried into the field of play — four near home plate, two on the mound and one near first base and third base — with parallel audio feeds: one includes the field mics and the other does not, allowing for seamless shifting to avoid curses without inserting dead air.
“It’s distinctive, I will say that,” Orlins said. “You’ll hear the bat crack and know the difference.”
More dramatic was the installation of a camera in front of the backstop to recreate a bygone part of baseball broadcasts: the low-home camera. That view of the field from behind home plate remains the best vantage point to capture tight shots of the pitcher’s face or convey the batter’s viewpoint toward the mound. Famous shots of Randy Johnson or Roger Clemens peering at the batter over the tops of their gloves were filmed from that spot. “Those were iconic images of the sport,” Orlins said. The low-home spot was so ingrained in broadcast culture that it came to be known simply as Camera 6.
“That’s because it was really the sixth camera beyond the basic five that would cover the most minimalistic baseball telecast,” he said. “You got the sixth because it was essential to coverage of any meaningful baseball game.”
When Orlins started working on ESPN Sunday Night Baseball productions in 1990, the crew would have only nine cameras — compared to the 30 in use on Tuesday night — yet not having Camera 6 would have been “unthinkable.” The ballpark construction boom in the mid-1990s and some reconsidered business models eliminated clubs’ willingness to let networks place a camera there. Back then, the camera body was much larger and required an operator. ESPN often put the installation on wheels to shift back and forth behind the plate depending on the handedness of the batter. That, Orlins conceded, did eliminate up to eight seats in each of the first two rows, which was a huge amount of revenue.
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
ESPN began brainstorming ways to replicate that camera during the 2016 season and conjured the idea of using a robotically operated camera placed vertically at the backstop shooting up at a mirror. With a traditional horizontal camera placement, the necessary lens length for the close-up of a pitcher’s face — about 20 inches — would have been impractical. “It’s just too vulnerable and intrusive,” VER’s director of global camera operations, Patrick Campbell, said.
Steve Raymond, the senior technical specialist for ESPN’s remote production operations, collaborated with Campbell on a creative solution. Campbell previously worked with ESPN on some 3D productions earlier in the decade and has set up cameras on the sets of more than 30 feature films, including Avatar and Tron: Legacy. He mocked up an example last fall by 3D-printing parts and sent the dummy version to MLB for preliminary approval based on sizing, then created a 45-inch high prototype for Spring Training.
That version was deployed in a grand debut during the April 23 Sunday night broadcast at Citi Field, in which visiting Washington Nationals slugger Daniel Murphy slugged a first-inning grand slam against his former New York Mets teammates with the low-home camera capturing the ball flight from pitcher Zach Wheeler’s hand to Murphy’s bat and then on its trajectory beyond the right-center field wall in a dramatic shot.
Not every backstop is as tall as the one at Citi Field, however, so Campbell went back to work reconfiguring the protective box encompassing the Sony HDC-P43 camera and Fujinon lens. The updated version measured only 32 inches of height and has been in regular use since a July game at St. Louis’ Busch Stadium. (The original prototype was also used in U.S. Open tennis coverage.)
The padded box around the camera blends well enough into its surroundings (with only an opening for the angled mirror) that someone on the field in St. Louis thought the stanchion was a trash receptacle. On Tuesday night, Campbell stood sentry by the camera during batting practice and affixed a sign that read: “Please do not sit, lean or place items on padded surfaces.”
In ESPN’s two production trucks stationed in an alleyway behind Yankee Stadium, the low-home camera was rebranded from its Camera 6 heritage and designated “16 – Nolan” for the night, the first name in honor of the camera’s joystick-wielding operator.
Come broadcast time, Campbell acknowledges a sense of pride each time his creation is implemented in the coverage, with cameramen long keeping track of how many tallies their camera gets.
“Depending on the director, we get a lot of tallies,” Campbell said. “Since this is not a camera added for every game, I feel bad because I’m taking away tallies from other cameras.”
For the ESPN crew that is always trying to break new ground with technology, sometimes what’s old can be new again. “I think it’s more useful than most of the innovations you’re going to see and write about,” Orlins said, “but it’s not like people turn on the TV and go, ‘Oh my God, there’s a camera where I never saw a camera before.’ Actually, it’s exactly where we once used to see cameras.”