The shot from center field over the pitcher’s shoulder at the hitter is still the television mainstay. Heck, it’s baseball comfort food, so MLB broadcasts still feel largely the same as they have for decades. But beyond that main course, the sheer number of available shots major broadcasters use to tell the story around it, the narrative options, have taken off in recent years, and are on display in this World Series.
Fox Sports is deploying more than 40 cameras during the Yankees-Dodgers World Series, vice president of field operations and engineering Brad Cheney said. Umpires wear cameras on their mask or chest. Miniature lenses are hidden on parts of the infield, and shallow-depth-of-field cameras create a cinematic look, focusing on the foreground with the background blurred.
Drones, at least some requiring Federal Aviation Administration coordination, are used both inside and outside the stadium, and temporary flight restrictions sometimes ground them during the game. Then there’s the handheld rigs, or the one suspended on a wire, and many more.
“It’s grown from the upper 20s to to the low 40s in the last couple years,” Cheney said. “As you look back at how technology has just changed, we had a lot less high frame-rate cameras, super-motion cameras. And a lot of them that we had were very specialized.”
Today, most all of the cameras can be cut to in real time, rather than being best used after a play has happened.
“We’re in a spot right now that we’re really talking about only having probably six cameras out there that are replay only, and they’re built for the swing-path analysis and pitch tracking and some of those items,” Cheney said. “That growth has been kind of exponential.”
Ryan Zander, Major League Baseball’s senior vice president of broadcasting, said two things have driven the explosion. One is that the technology, as it always does, has grown more scalable. High-definition cameras are proliferating. But he says the league has also grown hungrier for enhancements.
“MLB ballparks present all sorts of unique challenges, maybe different than other sports,” Zander said. “Unlike let’s say the NBA, where you can get very close to or get lenses very close to the action, we don’t really have that luxury because of large foul territories. Players are spread out. Every field has different dimensions. So it requires us to be innovative.”
Bringing in a new camera can be a long and complicated process, depending on what and more importantly, whom it could affect. A camera in the dirt, for example, has to be installed with the confidence that it’s highly unlikely to affect the on-field play in a meaningful way.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations, and done a lot of testing,” Cheney said of what’s known as Dirt Cam. “Is there a possibility? There’s always a possibility, but the likelihood is so extremely low. Back, gosh, when I started here at Fox 10 years ago or so, we did (tests) and I was out there with a number of the top baseball officials, including Joe Torre, who was running operations at the time.”
At the World Series, stars like Aaron Judge have cameras on them all the time.(Mary DeCicco / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
When Aaron Judge grounded back to the mound with a runner on first base during the sixth inning of Game 3 of the World Series, Dodgers pitcher Brusdar Graterol knocked it down and then scrambled to try to get a force out at second base. His throw was wide, to the right side of the bag, but Dodgers shortstop Tommy Edman acrobatically managed to keep a foot on the base as he came across.
A camera buried in the dirt right front of second showed a close up of Edman keeping his left foot on the bag, complete with some blades of grass in the shot.
But successful Dirt Cam installation depends, unsurprisingly, on the literal dirt a given team uses.
“Every team has the right to run their field a certain way, and there are certain places where we have to do a little more because the field is really hard,” Cheney said. “The harder a field is, for the players, the more consistent it is. I can understand why they want to do it, which makes us change our tactics in those things.”
Ump Cam, referring to a mask-mounted camera that weighs 10.23 ounces, took more than a couple years in a process with the umpires’ union. Impact testing, to make sure the unit stayed safe if a baseball hit it at a high speed, began in September 2020. Spring-training testing began the next year, and continued the next year. In July 2022, it debuted during the All-Star Game — a premier event for the league, but with lower stakes than the World Series. Regular-season games didn’t see Ump Cam until 2023, and then a second version of the camera was released this year.
“They’re so customized that it ends up being as expensive as a $100,000 giant broadcast camera, but the money is going into testing and development,” Cheney said.
MLB and broadcast partners can fall into typecast roles: a given network often can be the party that wants to move fastest in try something new, and MLB, interfacing with the other stakeholders, might be the more conservative of the parties.
“Over the years, especially recently, we’ve really made an effort to get out in front of this with our broadcast partners, so we could understand what it is that they want to do, so then we could handle those functions,” Zander said. “Whether it’s, dealing with our own baseball operations group that deals with our on field matters, whether it’s the umpires, whether it’s even clubs.”
Zander said success for a specific camera effort can be difficult to measure. Surveys help, and so too do fan compliments or even rants on the web.
“Because it’s not like we can say a certain enhancement increased viewership, it’s hard to make that correlation,” Zander said. “What we do is to measure success is obviously (hear) feedback from our broadcast partners, given that they’re experts in this field. But we also have our own research that we do. What social media has provided is a great repository of information. We have the tools to go through and measure sentiment with our fans on certain enhancements.”
The new cameras don’t impact only the broadcast. On social media, MLB seeks the cinematic in both their broadcast footage and from their own on-site content creators.
“For years, the direction you’ve always been given in social is faster, faster, faster,” said Cameron Gidari, MLB’s vice president of social media and innovation. “When we’re able to kind of go long and when we’re able to go uncut, that’s actually where we’re seeing really outsized performance.
“Somebody hitting a home run, and then you’re staying on them from the home run to the bat flip, to the (run) down to first, around the bases, back into the dugout — uninterrupting that … fans are really liking that. It almost feels like you’re seeing it out of your own eyes, as opposed to watching a TV cut. And both are important. It’s the complement that really works for us.”
Ultimately, more and more cameras will be added to the mix. Zander called Ump Cam “a great jumping off point,” but said attempting to have players wear something similar is not a near-term plan. The players’ union would have to sign off and it’s not a small process.
But one thing the league has started to dabble in is called volumetric capture.
“Using a lot of cameras around the field that can stitch together so you can essentially get a perspective that you wouldn’t normally be able to get,” Zander said. “It would be great to see the perspective of a shortstop over his shoulder as he’s making a play. Obviously, you can’t put a camera out on the field during the play. But through certain technology that is being tested, that may be a reality sooner than we think. That’s something likely in the next several years.”
(Top photo: Corey Perrine / Getty Images)
