What will New Yankees and MLB games look like on TV without field sounds and fans in the stands? Here’s a look at what that might look like. This article is taken directly from The Athletic!
John Madden called back Fred Gaudelli on Tuesday with an answer. The veteran executive producer of NBC Sports’ Sunday Night Football had asked his old colleague the previous night how to handle games potentially played in front of no fans, kept away by COVID-19-related restrictions.
The conventional wisdom is that broadcasters, to mimic games of the past, will pipe in artificial crowd noise during the telecast. The Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster’s reply, Gaudelli recounted: Don’t.
“He said, ‘When I first left the coaching profession and went to broadcasting, there was something about it that I just felt was missing and I couldn’t really put my finger on it,’†Gaudelli recalled. “He said, ‘Then I realized that I wasn’t hearing the sound that I had grown accustomed to hearing — as a player and as a coach. I never coached from the box, I coached from the field.’ He said to me, ‘Fred, you’re going to hear things that even you have never heard, so I’d be really trying to figure out how to best capture those sounds, and present them to the audience and not worry as much about artificial sound.’â€
Piped-in crowd noise is just one of many options on the table for producing games with no spectators as the major sports eye returning, or in the case of the NFL, starting a new season in the COVID-19 era. The sports that have returned, such as UFC, NASCAR, and to a lesser extent, golf and tennis (exhibitions), have experimented with more audio. And WWE has gone so far as to place up-and-coming wrestlers in seats as fans, with plexiglass between them and the ring.
MLB, which is having ongoing conversations with teams and broadcasters about modifying various aspects of the game presentation with no fans in the ballpark, declined to comment on those talks.
Mark Gross, senior vice president of production at ESPN, which broadcasts MLB and has been televising Korean baseball games, said he couldn’t yet talk in detail about how he would approach the return of the national pastime. (MLB and MLBPA appear no closer to an agreement to return.) But he offered that there are differences between the smaller South Korean baseball stadiums, which typically max out at 30,000 seat capacity, and the larger North American ones. Larger stadiums would echo more with no fans, and perhaps lend themselves to piped-in crowd noise. If there are MLB games, ESPN will experiment with different camera angles, and perhaps station announcers remotely, Gross said.
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