This is neat. Game 1 of the NLCS will be on Fox, and we’ll have Joe Buck, Harold Reynolds and Tom Verducci in the booth. But over on their sister station Fox Sports 1 they’re going to do a little experiment. Here’s Rob Neyer explaining it:
This could be a total mess. It could be pretty cool. I wonder/worry about the box with the actual game being too small and the box with the talking heads like Kevin Burkhardt, C.J. Nitkowski, Gabe Kapler and Neyer being too big. Not that I have anything against those guys -- I love ‘em -- but because it’s pretty much all about the game action, right? We don’t need to see new analysts in order to get a new kind of analysis.
That quibble aside, I like the idea of Fox trying something new. I feel like the next frontier of baseball broadcasts will involve moving away from the traditional play-by-play/color model we have now (which was developed ages ago). Perhaps there will be options for multiple types of commentary, with the viewer able to choose like the SAP button or whatever. The traditional. The analysis-heavy like Fox is trying here. Maybe a no-commentary option. Maybe one in which guys just talk about the game like you might in a bar. I dunno. There are tons of possibilities, especially when you consider that a huge number of people watch these games with two screens anyway, be it a tablet or a smartphone or whatever at their side.
My guess is that, whatever happens on October 11 with this experiment, a real alternative to the classic setup will take a while to develop. But I’m glad to see someone starting somewhere.
