Hockey viewership on television is down in the depths occupied by curling and rodeo.
Remember the glowing puck from Fox’s mid-1990s hockey coverage? One of the most spectacular failures in sports TV history, the odd-looking blue orb ignited red during shots on goal but failed to ignite anything else in the way of ratings.
Never a network to be complacent, Fox is delving into its technological bag of tricks and recalling that infamous glowing puck. Friday night’s much-ballyhooed coverage of this season’s first clash between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox featured a series of similar on-screen graphics that seek to alter how we watch baseball.
Boston’s 6-2 win saw the debut of Ball Tracer, which showed a comet trail-style path of pitches as they traveled from the pitcher to the catcher, and High Home Camera, which displayed the trajectories of home runs, as well as gauging the leads of runners at first base with what looked like a multi-colored tape measure. Also in the works for this season is a silhouetted strike zone that will show pitch sequences with precise placement, not unlike ESPN’s celebrated K-Zone.
And in easily the most striking and bizarre move, viewers were introduced to “Scooter,” a talking baseball that sought to explain the nuances of certain pitches to children.
Several of these elements, particularly Ball Tracer and the strike zone, have been seen in some form on ESPN and TBS. But Fox being Fox, its versions come with the sounds of breaking glass, chirps, bleeps, crashes and other noises.
Why the renewed technological arms race? After all, last year’s division and league championship series were the most watched in eight years, and the Florida-New York World Series at last showed some improvement over recent, anemic numbers. Fox’s advertising revenue for Friday night’s game was estimated at nearly $10million, roughly five times the haul for a regular Game of the Week on Saturday afternoon.
The need and desire to keep pushing forward and engaging younger viewers stands firmly intact, and many of the new ideas emerged from commissioner Bud Selig’s 17-month-old marketing task force. That committee, composed of players, executives, academics and even union leaders, is charged with an open-ended task of improving fan interest in baseball.
“We’ve said this many times, but a lot of what we’re doing is sugarcoating the information pill,” said David Hill, Fox Sports chairman. “A lot of discussion from that panel has been about having more graphic illustration in what we do.”
Predictably, the results Friday with the new graphics were mixed. Fox was surprisingly judicious in using its toys, but Ball Tracer was a runaway success. Working somewhat like the stop-motion effects in “The Matrix” or the Eyevision technology used by CBS, the device effectively captured the extreme fluttering and movement of Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball.
Scooter, voiced by Tom Kenny of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” conversely was a disaster. Fox rolled him out in the top of the second inning to explain how Wakefield’s knuckleball worked and again in the third due to some initial audio problems. Scooter correctly informed viewers that a knuckleball “floats through the air” and is “hard to hit.” But nowhere was there any explanation of the grip a pitcher uses to throw a knuckleball, how that grip creates the distinctive motion, or why it remains something of a rarity in the game.
Rather than sugarcoating the information, there was simply little data here to be had.
Before Friday, Hill called Scooter “really cute and really terrific.” But in the same breath, he acknowledged Scooter and the rest of this new technology ultimately may not work.
“He’s still a work in progress,” Hill said. “If it works, it’ll be a demonstration. If it doesn’t, it’ll be an experiment.”
What is certain to stick around is the increased number of player interviews before, after and particularly during games. As does ESPN, Fox is working diligently with individual teams and the players’ union to improve in-game access. The move goes against baseball tradition, but in-game interviews rapidly are becoming commonplace in pro and major college sports, particularly the NFL and NBA.
Fox’s Kenny Albert talked to Wakefield immediately after his strong seven-inning outing, as well as Alex Rodriguez moments before the game’s first pitch. And thankfully, Albert’s line of questioning elevated far above the banal queries endemic to halftime interviews in football.
“I believe as we move forward, there is going to be far more access to players [during games],” Hill said. “I see the walls coming down greatly in the years ahead.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.