How NESN plans to cover Red Sox games this season
And what that means for Dave O’Brien, Jerry Remy and Dennis Eckersley.
The 2020 Major League Baseball season is in itself a mishmash of quirks, adjustments and new protocols as it attempts liftoff during what may still be the early innings of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The alternations necessary to have some semblance of a baseball season not only affect the games, of course, but the media outlets that cover and broadcast them.
One significant mandate by the MLB is that the television broadcast teams will not be permitted to travel to call games from the road broadcast booth.
Instead, MLB decided that the home team for a given game must provide a neutral, or “world,’’ broadcast feed for each game, with instructions to show both teams equally. Visiting teams can send this feed to its broadcasters in a studio, where they will call the game off a monitor.
This does not mean that a Red Sox home broadcast on NESN will be split 50-50 in terms of the attention paid to both teams, even though it will be providing that world feed for the visiting team.
In figuring out the calculus for its broadcast plans this season, NESN came up with a way to make its telecasts as familiar as possible – and it actually involves not having its broadcasters at Fenway Park for home games, either.
As reported here two weeks ago, NESN will broadcast all games from its studios in Watertown, with Dave O’Brien, Jerry Remy and Dennis Eckersley in a three-man “booth” that is actually Studio A at the network’s headquarters. NESN has 55 Red Sox regular-season broadcasts in all (30 home, 25 away) beginning with the June 24 opener against the Orioles. NESN will also carry two Red Sox home exhibition games on July 21 and 22 vs. Toronto (7:30 p.m.).
But NESN will have some personnel at the ballpark. Senior producer Amy Johnson and director Mike Narracci will be at Fenway Park in the production truck to provide the world feed and meet the MLB mandate.
NESN will situate producer/director Dan Aspan in the Watertown studio, where, without the obligation of providing equal coverage, he will watch the feeds from the various cameras set up at Fenway and tailor what we see so that it looks and sounds more like a typical NESN Red Sox production.
“When baseball first announced they were doing the world feed and everything, initially there they were going to be no announcers allowed in the park,’’ said Rick Jaffe, vice president of programming and production at NESN. “So when that happened we started looking at the plans and asked, ‘How are we going to do this?’”
One major consideration was Remy’s health. The popular former second baseman and broadcaster, entering his 33rd year on Red Sox broadcasts, has endured several recurrences of lung cancer. He is feeling well now in part due to a clinical trial that has helped him, but he falls into the high-risk category for COVID-19.
“One of the things that we talked about was Jerry’s health and we didn’t want to put him in jeopardy with anything that would harm him,’’ said Jaffe. “That was a very important consideration in all of this right away.”
The three broadcasters are situated six feet apart in the studio, which has a horseshoe setup so the three can see each other during the broadcast. All three broadcasters thought being able to make eye contact was important, and that may not have been possible logistically with the social distance guidelines in the booth at Fenway.
“Jerry was pleased that we were gonna have him in studio, and Eck and OB went right along with it, I thought, ‘Yeah, that sounds like a plan,’’ said Jaffe.
“And then when baseball first told us [about the world feed], it said, ‘Okay we want the world feed to be a 50-50 model, so you can’t show favoritism to one team or the other. You gotta play it right down the middle.’ Putting Amy and Mike at Fenway and Dan in the studio is the way we came up with to NESN-ize the Red Sox broadcast and make it more than a 50-50 broadcast.”
Aspan will have access to the feed from nine cameras in the studio, include one camera dedicated to each team and another that shows the whole field, sort of like the all-22 view in football. He will be able to see everything those cameras are providing, and he can deviate on the NESN broadcast from what the world feed is showing with the ability to cut to any shot he wants.
“So Mike and Amy will have to do it like a national broadcast from Fenway and then we’ll have the more of a Red Sox broadcast from here,’’ said Jaffe, who said MLB was fine with the plan as long as NESN provided a world feed for the visiting team’s broadcast. “And by having Dan and the on-air talent [in Watertown] together, the communication should be pretty thorough.”
Jaffe said there are some aspects of the broadcast that are still being worked out. Players will wear microphones, but the specifics aren’t set yet. Sideline reporter Guerin Austin is allowed in the ballpark during games, but she wouldn’t have access to the players beyond the now-familiar Zoom calls with the media, so the network is trying to determine whether there is benefit to having her there.
Jaffe said he is strongly in favor of having piped-in crowd noise, something the Red Sox have experimented with at Fenway during recent scrimmages.
“At first I thought, ‘Oh, well, we have to be traditional and there is no crowd, so there should be no crowd noise,’’ said Jaffe, who said he was on a recent conference call with MLB in which it was said every team plans to use the enhanced audio. “But then I saw soccer games with no crowd noise where I was going, wow, this sounds awful. The ambient crowd noise helped a little bit. I think it will help with baseball, too.”
Media notes
Marc James, who made some noise as a fill-in and weekend host at WEEI over the past couple of years, is no longer at the station and has moved to Florida … Recommendation: NBC Sports Boston’s “The Bill Belichick You Don’t Know” narrative podcast, hosted by Tom E. Curran, is not just excellent, but downright funny. It can be found on the NBC Sports Boston website as well as iTunes and the other usual podcast providers.
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