Imagine using your iPhone to take video of a rotary phone. That's how we felt watching Fox's World Series coverage with its heat-sensitive cameras, virtual strike zones and super slo-mo cameras tracking the 19th-century sensibilities of baseball. The tech gap pretty much sums up the challenge for MLB getting its sport out of the clutches of Ken Burns and into the hands of the next Steve Jobs.
Wednesday, Fox's HotSpot technology – borrowed from Australian cricket – schooled the sport when it showed a crucial foul tip went off Adrian Beltre's foot late in the game. Umpires instead called it a fair ball for an out in the ninth inning. Fox's doodad proved them wrong, but there's no crying for baseball replay. Texas went on to lose the game.
This on the heels of the TV virtual strike zone, which creates a consistent, accurate strike zone for viewers. For the past couple of seasons it has shown us that umpires do a pretty fair job of calling the strike zone, but if technology can do a better job, why are we going with human error?
The short answer is the umpires' union, which zealously protects its turf. And trying to keep baseball's glacial pace from slowing even further. The long answer is baseball tradition, which embraces its inner E6, celebrating that sometimes humans get it wrong but it all evens out in the end. Which is dog-ate-my-homework, of course.
It's not simply the use of modern tools such as infrared and virtual tech that matters in selling sports in 2011. The perception that a sport is keeping up with the times matters. We've said before that baseball is the sport that urban American culture forgot, and the demographics of baseball are greying like the baby boomers. If cricket – cricket! – can adapt to future tech, what's baseball's excuse?
Lineup Posted
To that point, if rain falls in the middle of the continent, will anyone notice? Especially if it affects Game 1 of the World Series? If you're TSN SportsCentre, you take a pass on World Series meteorology to lead with a Toronto Maple Leafs game against the mighty Winnipeg Jets. (Rogers Sportsnet, the rights holder to the Series, naturally led Connected with Texas at St. Louis.) Can you imagine any self-respecting news outlet not leading with the start of the World Series a generation ago?
But you can't really blame TSN for not pumping the tires of its rival's prize property. After all, in 1973, 34 million people in America watched the opening game of the World Series. This Series will be lucky to get 14 million watching any single game. That was 34 million in a nation that probably had maybe half as many TV households. (Initial numbers show Game 1 is down on Fox.)
Look at the micro for baseball and the picture isn't much better. Postseason viewership is in low single digits in major baseball markets such as Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles. The sport is fine regionally when the home team plays, but as a national spectacle, baseball has fallen off the map. TSN had nothing to lose by playing the Leafs card.
Strike Zaun
Our highlight from Sportsnet's Game 1 was Gregg Zaun's tribute to old-fashioned technology. Using video and a range of simple household products, Zaun demonstrated the art of cutting up baseballs to get extra movement on pitches. It was essential TV: visual, simple and funny. It's a matter of time till the American networks steal Zaun. He's that good.
Mark This Down
Intriguing tribute to Cardinals hitting coach Mark McGwire from the Fox announcers. Joe Buck talked about how hard McGwire had worked on learning hitting after his first years in Oakland. Nary a mention of the andro unpleasantness giving him a tiny boost. While MLB has forgiven McGwire for doping and lets him on the field at its greatest showcase, the writers/voters will never forgive McGwire and allow him into the Hall Of Fame at Cooperstown.
Gumbel Jumble
HBO's Bryant Gumbel has proved himself an unreconstructed 1960s liberal in the past. Forget there's a black U.S. president in Barack Obama, Gumbel sees the world as if Nixon were still in the White House. Witness his comments about ignoring the Winter Olympics because they lacked black athletes. (Gumbel's wife, ironically, is white.)
This week Gumbel suggested NBA commissioner David Stern had a "plantation" mentality toward the locked-out NBA players, more than 80 per cent of whom are black. (And most of whom are "chained" to multimillionaire salaries by the NBA.) This theme was picked up by others who suggested that Stern, who is Jewish, was patronizing toward the head of the players' union, Billy Hunter, who is black.
Did anyone hear NHL commissioner Gary Bettman's tone toward NHLPA boss Bob Goodenow during the 2004-05 lockout? Both men are white, and Bettman's condescension to Goodenow made Stern's attitude sound like Mr. Rogers. The election of Barack Obama was supposed to relieve racial tension in the U.S., but in Bryant Gumbel's NBA, at least, the grievance industry remains fully vested.