MLB Taking Broadcast Experience to New Level

The new MLB Replay Operations Center, across from Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan

With an audience more captive than ever because of COVID-19, Major League Baseball unveiled an array of technological enhancements Monday meant to entertain, inform, and enhance the broadcast experience for fans relegated to watching exclusively on their TVs and computers.

The Boston Globe listed some of the highlights:

• Television broadcasts will feature Statcast 3D, which can generate high-resolution, data-based visuals that go beyond recent, well-received innovations such as ball and player tracking. For example, curiosity about whether a fly ball to deep right field at Fenway Park would be a home run at Yankee Stadium can be satisfied by overlaying the Yankee Stadium footprint on top of Fenway. Cameras can in essence become virtual, offering a recreation of a sharply hit ground ball from the perspective of the third baseman fielding it, the ball, or plenty more.

“Statcast really brings up interesting story lines that you often can’t tell through a way a broadcast is traditionally shot because you’re sort of limited to how production shoots the show. You’re limited to where cameras are and what cameras are looking at,” said Ryan Zander, MLB Vice President, Broadcast Products & Services. “Statcast 3D is a platform that is going to allow us to tell some of these stories and visually show some of these stories.”

• MLB is not planning to let the empty seats go entirely to waste. Unless the home team decides to stretch advertising-emblazoned tarps over seat sections, virtual advertising signage can be used. The ads can also be seen on the field: MLB showed “Dunkin’” in foul territory, and a Gatorade “G” on the back of the pitcher’s mound.

Each team will use crowd noise, from a routine murmur up to play-specific reactions, that uses actual game audio from the “MLB The Show” video game.

• In a concession to both COVID-19 and the fallout from the Red Sox and Astros video cheating escapades, players and coaches will have a personal iPad at their disposal, pre-loaded with video content — say, that game’s starting pitcher, a batter’s previous encounters with a pitcher, advanced scouting reports, and spray charts. MLB controls and dispenses the devices (around 15 per team), which can not connect online in any way during a game. If it happens to get stolen or misplaced, MLB has the capability to wipe its memory. After each game, the iPads are collected, sanitized, then re-loaded for the next game.
• Instant replay will get its first major technological refresh since it began in 2014. The Replay Operations Center will be able to view up to 24 isolated camera angles, some with high-frame capability, compared with a dozen last year.

Another welcome development: Managers will have only 20 seconds, not 30, to challenge a call.