20 20 Hindsight - Baseball on TV

So - while rumors start to circulate that the Rog wants to come back to Boston - and the Red Sox take another beating from the Indians - I remember that this is, sort of, a film blog: so - looking at that '86 game - how has baseball on TV changed in the last 20 years? It was on opposite a Cubs-Marlins game on ESPN - and I've watched a couple of the Sox-Indians games since the Clemens replay - so - worth making a couple comparisons.

The first thing to notice is what hasn't changed: the basic template for showing baseball is about the same. Shots of the batter - shots of the pitcher - center-field shot of the pitch - behind the catcher shot of the play - the replays and details have evolved, but the basics are the same. The major changes, in how the game is shot, are:

1) The use of one of the most annoying shots in television: the shot from behind the catcher between pitches, almost always with a little left to right pan. God, that shot drives me crazy! There's no information in it - the pan means nothing whatsoever - maybe it sets the overall scene, but why the camera move? It's ugly, completely automatic, and almost gives me vertigo. NESN (the Red Sox network) doesn't do it as much as ESPN - ESPN does it on every at-bat almost. Horrible.

2) These days, the shots of the pitchers and catchers are a lot tighter - almost all close-shots, sometimes even closeups. In the '86 game, most of the shots of the pitcher were Medium shots. Similar treatment of hitters. This is combined with a lot more camera movement - little zooms in, little movements, reframing the player. The tighter framing requires more camera movement to keep the players in the hsot - though there are also movements (or more often zooms) for dramatic effect. Very little of any of that in the Clemens game - pretty much stable waist up shots of the pitcher and hitters...

3) As far as what is shown - one noticeable difference is how much more we see of the dugouts. Admittedly - the Clemens game was edited, so a lot of filler might have been taken out - but most of the cutting seemed to come between innings, not in the inning. Now - both the ESPN game that was opposite the '86 game and all the Sox games I've seen this year are constantly showing the dugouts. I do not think I saw a single shot of John McNamara in that 86 broadcast; I don't even know who managed the Mariners. But I would recognize Eric Wedge or Joe Madden or even Sam Perlozzo if I saw them on the street, because by god there are three shots of them an inning these days... Crowd shots also seem a lot more common now than 20 years ago - but there were crowd shots in 1986: there were very few dugout shots of any sort, and now they are standard.

4) There are also a lot more interruptions these days - though this could be distorted more by the editing. These days - you get crowd reporters; you get cuts to the studio for game updates; you get clips, at least on ESPN. This makes sense, of course, when you have clips - instead of Bob Montgomery listing off scores around the league, you can cut to a feed from the Yankees or Braves game. But the "sideline reporter" thing (or whatever the baseball equivalent is) - no; that's a dire innovation.

5) Then there are the gimmicks - dirt cams, the "K-zone" (an electronic box purporting to show the strike zone), helmet cams, miked bases, etc. Thankfully, the game on ESPN opposite Clemens-86 was just a run of the mill mid-week game - the gimmicks were at a minimum. K-zone, yes - but no dirt cams, no helmet cams.... NESN doesn't do that stuff now, thank god. I don't think the national games did in 1986 - but to be fair, I'd have to watch a nationally broadcast game, a world series game or something.

Meanwhile, down on the field....

1) Uniforms - a red sox/mariners game in 1986 provided an interesting case study. The Mariners, of course, had ghastly 80s style uniforms - but the Sox didn't look too bad. The Sox and Yankees, and a couple other teams, but especially those two, did not follow unfortunate trends in uniforms - they kept the button up shirts, the basic patterns, letterings, colors - they never got ugly. (The Yankees especially - the Yankees have looked good from day one to the present. They may be the personification of evil on earth, but they sure look good doing it.)

2) Style of play: baseball is baseball, but you can see a few things. Like Mike Moore tossing over the first base over and over with people like Dwight Evans on base - what's with that? These days, even Tim Wakefield only goes to first 2-3 times if there's a good base-runner on there - and Wakefield has to hold runners on! The red sox didn't run - Dwight Evans didn't run - what on earth possessed managers to harass the guy on first like that? This certainly is part of the change in the game - no one runs like they did in the 80s; it's interesting that a lot of teams have deliberately stopped trying to hold runners like that, thinking the batter is more important than the runners - Joe Kerrigan's Red Sox were notorious for ignoring baserunners. The endless throws to first seem a lot rarer these days, even when pitchers are trying to thwort the running game.

3) While I'm talking about style of play - long gone are the days of the Walt Hriniak/Charlie Lau disciples - nobody goes up looking to loop one to the opposite field these days. And so no one is balancing on one leg and pointing their toe out toward the pitcher a la Rich Gedman. Everyone's leaning over the plate and hoping to hit home runs.

4) Meanwhile, off the field: the most shocking thing about the 1986 game was this - empty seats. There may be empty seats in Jacobs field (quite a few actually) - but none in Fenway. Haven't been any for years. But in 86, half the park was empty when Clemens threw those 20 K's. That game - and his 24 wins - and the world series loss - probably changed that. Maybe not all at once - but it started things on the road. It started the marketing of the Red Sox, though that didn't really kick in until the late 90s. But it was going - the curse of the bambino stuff started around the 86 world series...

5) Marketing - this stuff started before the strike, but after the strike, it became pervasive. In 1986, when an outfielder caught the ball to end an inning - he tossed it in to the umpire. In 2006 - when an outfielder catches a ball to end an inning - he turns and throws it into the stands. (Once in a while, when an outfielder didn't get enough sleep the night before, he does this with less than 3 outs. Oddly, I think Trot Nixon has done this more often than Manny Ramirez.) That kind of constant fan friendliness is new. Mascots in Fenway? ball girls on the lines, making plays, chatting with the fans; ballplayers tossing balls into the stands after innings, between innings - it's all new. Meanwhile, so are the ads - on the walls, all around the park - and throughout the broadcast - every stat, every little piece of information, is sponsored by someone. Logos and ads and the linke clutter the screen. Even the announcers are in the game, at least Jerry Remy - did Bob Montgomery have his own hot dog brand? His own line of clothing? I don't think so.

20 20 Hindsight

That title is a a labored pun indeed, for a post that is, in fact, about the 20th anniversary of Roger Clemens' (first) 20 strikeout game. (Coming up April 29.) NESN replayed it the other night - they do from time to time. I have seen parts of it, but this might have been the first time I watched the whole thing. I didn't in 1986. I read about it the next day, in awe, how else can you read about something like that? 20 K - 0 Walks. Watching it, it's clearer - he made about 1 bad pitch all night, to Gorman Thomas, who lost it.... otherwise - I mean.... Looking at this game, watching Clemens on the mound, especially comparing him to his opponent, Mike Moore, who was supposed to be a star himself, but never quite made it (though he had a nice run with Tony LaRussa's A's), you can see why Clemens is Clemens. He exudes confidence. He expects to get people out. Moore? pitched a very good game that night himself (and was a decent pitcher, after all) - but he looked nervous, worried, as if things were weighing heavily upon him. Maybe I shouldn't make too much of that - but one of these pitchers is the greatest pitcher ever, and one is not.

Is Clemens the best? Given his era? It's an interesting fact - there might be, active, now, 3, 4 position players among the best ever to play the game: Bonds; A Rod; and though it's easy to forget lately - Griffey. Pujols is off to that kind of start (better than any of those guys - better, in fact, that just about anyone ever.) (From a positional point of view, a case can be made for Piazza and Pudge Rodriquez, as well.) But on the hill, the pitchers are even better - Clemens, Johnson, Maddux, Pedro - that's 4 of the best right there, with numbers not far off the all time greats - pitching in a notorious hitters era. And, except for the Rog, going strong - and the odds are good Clemens will land somewhere before the season's up. He's due for another 20 K game, after all...

Is he the best? Yeah. He's been better longer than any of those other 3 - outpitched all of them except Martinez (who's 9 years younger) last year... They've all had better seasons - Pedro has the single best pitching season ever (2000) (part of a string, from 97-02 (though hurt in 01) as good as anybody's ever), Johnson in 04, Maddux in the strike years - all better than anything Clemens offered, even '86 - but Clemens has been at it forever, never really hurt, and able to reestablish himself whenever he starts to look a bit long in the tooth. And - he has those 2 games - 20K; 0 walks - twice! Kerry Wood's 20K night might have been even better (1 hit; against a better class of team, the Astros with Biggio and Bagwell and Alou), but Roger did it twice - 10 years apart - as part of a career that lives up to it. That 1986 game - is, basically, when people realized, for sure, what they had. Not just a promising young stud - a guy moving from promising to legit. With that game, he became the best pitcher in the game, and though other people have been better over certain 3-4 year stretches, he's always been around to resume the role. What can you say?