Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Watching Baseball on TV, and a Suggestion to Make It Better

In the evenings when I find myself sitting in front of the TV set with a remote in my hand, I often seek out whatever Major League Baseball games happen to be on.  Sometimes Fox is showing one, either on its major network channel (Cox Gainesville channel 13) or on FS1 (Cox channel 62).  ESPN (26) often shows a game during this time and the Tampa Bay Rays and Miami Marlins have their own respective channels (48 and 70).  I've noticed that they're trying to make baseball more appealing to the viewing audience...ESPN has players on one or both teams hooked up with a mike and they talk back and forth with the announcers, not only in the dugout but also out in the field.  I like that, but I have a suggestion that will "hit" the viewers where they live.  Most of us have the experience of going up to home plate and taking our turn at bat, either in softball or baseball if only at a sandlot or school physical education class level.  On the other hand, relatively few of us have pitching experience...yet the pitcher/batter interaction is almost always shown on television from the pitcher's perspective.  I'd like to watch those same fastballs, changeups, curveballs, sliders and sinkers come in from the batter's viewpoint instead, since, after all, my own personal connection with the game is tied up with swinging the bat.  Since the catcher and umpire are pretty close to home plate and would visually block pitches were a camera placed immediately behind them, why not instead strategically place two cameras behind the plate but enough to the left and right to clear the view of the incoming pitch...and then digitally merge the images into one while eliminating the catcher and umpire?  You'd then have a better sense of what the batters have to face on a major league level when they have to discern, in split-seconds, where a pitch is going and how fast it is.  Wouldn't that make watching the game more exciting and interactive?  If you think this would make the game not quite as real, keep in mind that they currently superimpose the strike zone in the form of an imaginary rectangle hovering over home plate for each pitch.  Well, maybe this will be a future innovation, but for the time being I guess I'll just enjoy what they dish up right now...

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