Disorienting as it is, Royals’ broadcasters strive to make most of pandemic baseball
As the Royals began their pandemic-delayed 2020 season Friday night in Cleveland, their last remaining original employee was in what he called a “cave in the Himalayas.”
More precisely, Denny Matthews was in his house in Leawood for what he quipped was a “true home game.” That is expected to become his routine all season, for home and away games, given the precautions being taken because of the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Through the magic of an iPad and a Zoom video connection, Matthews engaged with partners Steve Physioc and Steve Stewart at Kauffman Stadium to create a broadcast built on their cosmic connection and limited video feeds from Cleveland … much the same way that Ryan Lefebvre and Rex Hudler did for Fox Sports Kansas City.
“You feel disengaged; all you can hear is yourself,” Matthews said after the Royals’ final exhibition game Wednesday in St. Louis. “But you make the most of it. That’s all you can do.”
So they did Friday with a broadcast that, remarkably, mostly sounded like business as usual.
At least if they didn’t have the integrity to regularly note where they were and not insinuate they were in Cleveland … and if you didn’t obsess on the fact crowd noise was being piped in … and know the announcers were navigating delays that meant you might hear an “I got it, I got it” before hearing the delivery of a pitch described … etc.
“I keep thinking my computer is blocking the field,” Physioc joked between innings in the home radio booth looking out over an empty Kauffman.
‘I’m thinking, ‘What am I saying?’’
There are a zillion moving parts to all this, so many other roles that figure into how these presentations will go. That includes stories about the roles of FSKC’s Joel Goldberg and Jeff Montgomery on pre-game and post-game shows and the under-the-radar hard work of producers, engineers, camera operators, statisticians, and many others.
But the most visible burden, and opportunity, falls on those so adept at telling us the story in real-time now doing so during road games without the same instant access to full scenes to which they are accustomed.
“I’m beholden to what’s on the screen,” Matthews said, “(and) you don’t see the overall picture.”
Say when a ball is hit in the gap with a runner on first: Matthews usually is apt to look back and forth at each element of the play five or six times in a few seconds. Now, he won’t be able to see that without a replay.
For that matter, it’s disorienting even in the more comprehensive technical setting Lefebvre has at the ballpark, with one screen before him (the view you are seeing at home) and another on the so-called “all-nine” screen holding steady on the overall field.
Lefebvre realized during their one road practice game in these conditions that he had to rethink even what he’s looking at and find what he called a new tempo and routine for elemental aspects of the work.
Including how he employs fresh resources.
Consider moments like Alex Gordon’s throw to second base against the Cardinals that made for an inning-ending double play and prevented a run from scoring. How did Lefebvre know Harrison Bader was out at second before the would-be run came across the plate?
Because from the empty stands in “St. Louis all the way to Kansas City,” he said, he could hear the ump yell “no run” in his headset.
“So I said (immediately) on the air, ‘The run doesn’t count,’ ” he said.
But on the commercial break he had a sudden worry.
“I’m thinking, ‘What am I saying?’” he recalled Thursday. “That could have come from a dugout. … As it turned out, I was lucky I got it right.”
Among other dilemmas: How to contour a broadcast for a Kansas City audience from a so-called world feed from opposing ballparks?
It’s more detailed and complicated than that. But what you’re seeing this weekend is basically the Cleveland broadcast with some wiggle room for production elements (and the ability to communicate only with one camera or maybe two) specific to Kansas City.
So Lefebvre and Hudler may be telling a story about Mike Matheny while the camera stays on Francisco Lindor putting pine tar on his bat.
“That’s just going to happen from time to time,” Lefebvre said. “There’s nothing we can do about that.”
‘You can’t lateral a horse’
If you ever saw the movie “Bull Durham,” the idea of broadcasting games you’re not attending in person might conjure scenes of manufactured sound effects for road games as described in the script:
“TEDDY THE ANNOUNCER re-creates the game for broadcast with a several second delay.
“HIS ASSISTANT (P.A. ANNOUNCER FROM THE BALLPARK) has a phone to her ear, and writes down each play on a piece of paper, holding it up for Teddy who enhances shamelessly in his ON THE AIR ‘play by play.’
“CLOSE ON PAPER — His assistant writes ‘DOUBLE TO LEFT.’
“TEDDY HITS A TINY MALLET against a jar. Thunk. The sound of ball hitting bat. He punches one of several tape cassettes cued up. A crowd roars. An array of special effects is at his fingertips.”
Lefebvre laughed at the reference amid a conversation largely about the highly sophisticated ways available now to both validate and animate scenes from afar.
(The incredible tech resources of the day include the distressing element of virtual fans in the stands that Fox plans to usher in for its national broadcasts beginning Saturday.)
And he had the punchline of the day when he asked about a long-ago football radio broadcast in which announcer Bill Stern realized he had misidentified a breakaway runner. He then fibbed to say he had lateraled the ball to the player who actually was on his way to a touchdown.
When Clem McCarthy, a well-known horse-racing announcer of the era, soon thereafter identified the wrong horse winning the Preakness but owned up to it, Stern chastised him.
To which McCarthy responded, as Lefebvre recalled, “You can’t lateral a horse.”
The reference to that retort was Lefebvre making the point that Fox wants them to regularly remind viewers they aren’t there ... but it’s also some lighthearted testimony to his own sense of the moment.
At a chaotic time when people need diversion, what he and other broadcasters do is a great responsibility, but with a certain qualifier:
“The tendency might be that we need to take this more seriously, because it’s a serious time right now, but I almost feel like the opposite,” Lefebvre said. “I feel like in the big picture what hasn’t changed is that sports provide a three-(hour) break from everything else going on in somebody’s life. And … (time to) not have to think about everything else.”
Perhaps that means he’ll tell more personal stories instead of adhering to his usual instinct to think it’s never about him, or flip it to ever-lively, loquacious broadcast partner Rex Hudler.
“When we’re not on the air, Hud and I aren’t working on the coronavirus vaccine, you know?” he said. “So … if we can use our experience to make somebody laugh, and they go to bed thinking about Hud eating an earthworm in Japan instead of not getting a call back from the job they interviewed with and thinking about that all day, well, then maybe that’s the most important thing we do.”
‘Clarity we’ve never heard before’
Whether it’s in ballparks or the real world, a certain sensory deprivation underscores Lefebvre’s point. That can either dull or amplify the senses.
Somewhere in between is something to appreciate.
Perhaps it might be related to what Lefebvre told The Star’s Pete Grathoff for a story a few weeks ago about how he was processing what might be called a kind of hush all over the world.
“My wife (Sarah) has these huge bird feeders outside of our kitchen and these incredible birds are coming up to the bird feeder,” said Lefebvre, who along with his wife has been homeschooling their four children during this time. “We’ve seen cardinals, we’ve seen blue jays, we’ve seen bluebirds, we’ve seen finches. The tufted titmouse.
“We have this little book that of course we’ve never cracked open before, ‘Native Birds of Missouri.’ And now it’s at the kitchen table. We sit there and we eat at the pace we want to eat and we just look at the different birds coming, and it’s just like, ‘This is the way we’re supposed to live.’ ”
Even if he’s not quite ready to say “This is the way we’re supposed to broadcast,” he sees something worth savoring in this situation.
“I think as a younger announcer, there’s a tendency at a baseball game that if there’s a lull that we have to be saying something all the time,” he said. “And I think it just comes from experience that those ambient noises are just as much a part of the game and what makes baseball unique.”
So even with ambient sound is being piped and even with no real fan reactions to play off, Lefebvre has found something reassuring in the relative stillness of the game right now.
“When you go to a game with a friend, you’re chatting occasionally but sometimes you’re just sitting quietly and watching the game,” he said, later adding, “Sometimes it’s OK to just kind of go with the flow or the mood of the game.”
That means embracing the authentic crack of the bat and resounding pop of the glove and hearing an umpire shout “no run” and realizing that even now less can be more.
“We’re going to hear things from the stadiums that we’ve never heard,” he said, “and clarity that we’ve never heard before.”
Amid so much confusion otherwise.
Meanwhile, Matthews reckons this is just the latest application of what his father told him long ago about life being nothing more than a series of adjustments.
Sometimes it’s sliders and curveballs and changeups coming at you.
And other times, as it happens, it’s a pandemic.
It’s still all about the adjustments. For everybody.