In the future, broadcasters will chat with hitters between pitches and with quarterbacks between downs.
Don’t believe me? Watch this:
Double hit over Mookie Betts' head while he is being interviewed by ESPN — "I ain't getting this one, boys" — ESPN booth cracks up. pic.twitter.com/SXLhuaUfP9
— Cork Gaines (@CorkGaines) March 27, 2018
During spring training, ESPN caught lightning in a bottle when Mookie Betts couldn’t.
ESPN slapped a mic and earpiece on the Red Sox outfielder, creating live two-way communication between him and the announcers in the booth during play, so those watching heard Betts tell Karl Ravech and crew “I ain’t getting this one, boys” as he chased a Kris Bryant double.
The producers originally asked for Hanley Ramirez, but the Sox offered Betts. The resulting clip got millions of combined views online.
“Once he started working on his golf swing in the outfield while wearing the microphone—he was really close to demonstrating dance moves,” ESPN’s head baseball producer Phil Orlins said, “You got to think what people in the crowd are seeing. They don’t know he’s talking to somebody.”
Of course, the game the meant nothing. FOX produced similarly cool moments during last year’s All-Star Game with Bryce Harper and George Springer, but there’s no guarantee it will ever happen during the regular season.
“We’d love to be able to try it,” Orlins said. “I’m not sure how likely that aspect of it is.”
After seeing this success, how could leagues and teams balk at the chance to capture this kind of TV gold? Before you answer, you need a history lesson from Orlins:
ESPN has been “mic’ing up” major leaguers during games for nearly 20 years. Traditionally, the RF signal from the player’s lavalier mic is recorded in the production truck, screened by a producer, and then played back on air usually in a later segment.
Orlins said the requests from regional and national broadcasters for cooperative high-profile personalities like Johnny Damon were too frequent, so less players and teams have been on board lately. Every organization is different, he said, but approving players can sometimes go as high as a team’s GM.
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And not everything recorded is fair game, either. Profanity is out, including what Orlins dubbed as “implied profanity,” meaning only bleeping a single profane word and not its context. Anything interpreted as strategic or part of an argument will never make air.
“Pitching coach goes to the mound and says to the guy ‘let’s get a ground ball and get two.’ Is that strategic? I don’t think that was shocking information,” Orlins said.
ESPN is also hiding mics underneath bases and burying them around the infield. For Sunday Night Baseball, ESPN plants four mics in front of home plate on the edge of the grass, two in front of the mound, and two behind second base.
“Rich Hill was an epic grunter,” Orlins said. “The Rich Hill/Hunter Pence match-up was Monica Seles versus Monica Seles in terms of grunting.”
They’re meant to pick up the natural sounds of the game, but sometimes chatter sneaks in. Again, ESPN must kill them during any heated conversation and be ready to dump any profanity.
Orlins said the league agreed to the underground mics under the condition that ESPN had a smooth way to eliminate the occasional swearing. Often referred to as “bleeping,” common practice has become for a master control or studio operator to hit a button that temporarily mutes all audio. ESPN transmits enough channels of audio back to Bristol that instead of muting, the “bleep” retains general natural sound while dropping field sound.
When perfectly executed, not only will viewers not hear the profanity, they won’t know it ever existed.
SportTechie Takeaway
Technology has created unbelievable opportunities for more access, but blocking a lot of it from getting in front of fans isn’t logistics, it’s politics.
“It’s just a complicated process with a lot of different parties in the mix,” Orlins said. “Baseball supports us doing this stuff but actually getting it to fruition in regular season is a little more challenging than just having their support.”
We asked him if he thought his mics would have been able to pick up audio to help viewers better understand what Anthony Rendon may have said to get ejected in a recent game at Nationals Park, which was impossible to interpret without Joe West’s explanation to the media following the game. Even if they had picked up audio, Orlins said, “we would not have been able to refer to that with great specificity.”
As long as producers have to judge in-game audio like admissible evidence at a trial, the path toward greater access will be painfully slow. The Betts interview isn’t good for the sanctity of baseball, but it’s definitely good for ratings. In a handful of years, we’ll see which one is winning.