An Awesome All*Star Broadcast

I finally got a chance to watch the All*Star Game this morning, and it was quite possibly the best All*Star broadcast ever!  FOX always tries different things during the All*Star Game, to varying degrees of success.  But this year, everything they did worked!  All of it was enjoyable.  Ump Cam.  The miced up players.  The in-game conversations.  Letting Big Papi loose.  All of it!

My favorite thing might've been the inning-long dialogue between Gerrit Cole and Max Fried.  They talked about how much they don't miss hitting and got into their favorite hitting moments (which allowed Joe Davis to gush about Shohei Ohtani).  Throwing some barbs at John Smoltz didn't hurt either!

Then there was Nestor Cortes and Jose Trevino being miced up and letting us listen in as they went over the pitch sequence.  We got to hear the thought process that went into every pitch.  That's a level of insight you're not going to get otherwise.

What made it better was that Trevino was still miced up when he was hitting the following half inning, and he flat out said, "You guys can keep talking to me.  I don't care."  So they did.  Then, after he singled, they kept the conversation going the entire time he was on first base.  It was also cool to hear Trevino ask for the ball after his first All*Star hit...a half inning after he made sure Cortes kept the ball from his first All*Star strikeout.

They weren't the only Yankees who got in on the fun.  Both Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton were on live mics during the bottom of the third, when Stanton explained that as a kid, he would go to Dodger games and sit in the left field bleachers, right behind the spot where he was playing.  Stanton, of course, would go on to crush a two-run homer to that same area in the top of the fourth, which earned him MVP honors.

Stanton's interaction with Big Papi was also, for me, the highlight of the Red Sox legend and newly-minted Hall of Famer's takeover of the AL dugout.  Actually, everything about Big Papi's visit to the AL dugout was amazing!  From asking Dusty Baker to put him in to his man-love for Miguel Cabrera to asking Alek Manoah how he'd pitch him...only to let Manoah know that he'd take him yard!

Speaking of Manoah, he's the one who started all of the fun when he entered the game in the bottom of the second.  The ongoing dialogue between him and both Joe Davis and John Smoltz was great!  Davis and Smoltz were giving him a (usually wrong) scouting report, and Manoah was taking us through his thinking as he was thinking it.  He was also working with his own catcher, Alejandro Kirk, so, had Kirk also been miced up, it could've been similar to what we got from Trevino and Cortes.  The fact that the one-sided version came first actually served as a perfect set-up.

In the eighth inning, after they showed a graphic with the stats of everybody who'd been miced up during the game, Smoltz lamented the only thing that hadn't happened yet.  Nobody had made a play while they were talking to them.  Enter the Mariners' Julio Rodriguez!  Rodriguez made another catch to end the inning, when White Sox pitcher Liam Hendriks was also miced up.  And Rodriguez, who knew Hendriks was listening, playfully acted like he was going to toss the ball into the stands just to mess with him!

As an umpire, I also loved the perspective that we got from Bill Miller's mask.  Now, the pitches that I see are nowhere near as fast as a Major League fastball, but the view is the same.  What I think it did most, though, was make people appreciate how difficult it was for hitters early in the game when the sun hadn't set yet and they had to deal with the shadows, as well as everything else.

Hopefully it also gave people some idea of how difficult an umpire's job actually is.  Fans love to complain about balls and strikes and how "awful" certain umpires are, but having a split-second to determine whether a pitch is over the plate or just missed isn't exactly easy.  It won't stop the complaints or the calls for robo-umps (BTW, there would still be a home plate umpire since you'd still need a person to call everything else that happens, so please stop acting like there wouldn't be!).  Maybe it at least gave an appreciation for the job, though.  (I do realize that it probably didn't.)

One of the things I found interesting about FOX's in-game interviews is that it was all American League players.  Was that just a coincidence?  I'm not so sure.  I'm also not entirely sure it was a complete coincidence that the AL won for the ninth straight year.  The side that's had All*Star success didn't have any reservations about doing it, and will probably agree to again next year in Seattle. 

Although, you'd have to think the NL might want to do something different just to change it up.  Nothing else has been working, after all!  It's also great exposure for whoever does it and a chance to show a little personality.  Sure, it's different than what they're used to doing, but this is the All*Star Game.  That's exactly when you do stuff like this!

The one exception to the no-NL rule was Clayton Kershaw.  The Dodgers legend was (finally) making his first All*Star start.  In his home park.  And he talked with Ken Rosenthal right before stepping on the mound.  (Of course, Tom Verducci was on the other side talking to Shohei Ohtani, who basically called his first-pitch single, a sign of things to come.)

There's obviously no way we'd ever seem something like this in the regular season!  Sure, they have the in-game interviews with managers and miced up players, but they'll never show something like a detailed pitch-by-pitch discussion of the pitch sequence.  For an exhibition game, though, it's perfect.  And it made for a highly entertaining broadcast.

That's what annoyed me so much about the people who are obsessed with dissecting the viewership numbers and how "only" 7 million people watched the game on TV.  These are the same people who say broadcast TV is dying as viewers are moving to streaming!  You can't have it both ways!  You can't say people aren't watching TV anymore because of streaming, then criticize the numbers that a TV broadcast draws.  Especially when 7 million on a Tuesday night is actually pretty good!

Would MLB like those viewership numbers to be higher?  Of course!  But those who did tune in (or DVRed) were treated to an absolutely phenomenal broadcast!  For all the gimmicky stuff FOX has done at the All*Star Game in the past that didn't work, everything they did this year worked.  Hopefully we see some more of it in 2023.