A dream team for a dream season
SNY has long put on one of the best television broadcasts in baseball, and as the Mets have risen to new heights, Addy Baird looks at how the best visual storytellers in the sport are also peaking
Project ShaqBox Trivia: In 1981, Ron Darling was the No. 9 pick in the draft, selected by the Rangers out of Yale. Less than a year later, Texas traded its righty prospect to New York with Walt Terrell for Lee Mazzilli. Not a great move for the Rangers, as Darling became a star and Mazzilli got traded to the Yankees for Bucky Dent later that same year, eventually working his way back to the Mets for the 1986 title run.
Half of 1981’s top 10 draft picks wound up playing for the Mets, including Darling and the Mets’ own selection, taken at No. 4 that year. Can you name that player, and the other three who eventually suited up in orange and blue?
The Freeform Jazz of SNY
By Addy Baird
So far this year, the New York Mets lead the league in hit by pitches. By now, regular viewers of SNY know what to expect when it happens.
“I don't care if a Met gets hit on the pant leg, we're gonna show Buck after that hit by pitch to see what happens,” John DeMarsico, who directs the Mets broadcasts on SNY, recently told me. “Early on in the year, I would show him and he'd give these faces and it's just, like, incredible to see the nuanced faces that he would give, and it sort of turned into, you know, I can't not shoot it now.”
When we spoke before the All Star break, DeMarsico teased that he had a plan for hit by pitches that he thought Mets fans might like, which he debuted during a recent game: A red-tinted, fuming Buck with the Kill Bill siren over the top.
By the next week, there was a montage of the hits playing over Buck’s furious face as the siren sounded yet again:
DeMarsico was promoted to his current position following the 2019 season, and he told me he looked forward to bringing his background in film to directing the games. But COVID, with the shortened season in 2020, and the use of global feed cameras into 2021, stymied his vision. Finally, this year he’s had a chance to shine. The Kill Bill HBP moment is exactly the kind of artful, quirky, film-inspired broadcasting that is central to the vibe DeMarsico brings to each broadcast.
In my seven years as a Mets fan, I’ve watched hundreds of Mets broadcasts on SNY. I fell in love with the elite broadcasting trio that is Gary, Keith, and Ron, who make watching the Mets worth it even when they are, as Keith would say, cellar dwellers. But the 2022 Mets are not cellar dwellers. The 2022 Mets are not even second division. The 2022 Mets are good, and as the team has soared, so too has the broadcast.
Frequent SNY viewers may have noticed an uptick in experimental camera work, artful shots of Citi, and the spirit of the spaghetti Western filling airtime during games this year, taking an already entertaining broadcast to a whole new level.
“The reason you probably have noticed a little bit of a difference is we're able to do the show that we want to do and the show that I want to do creatively,” DeMarsico said. “I’ve been able to put a little bit more of my personality in and take more chances and do some crazy stuff that you've been seeing.”
The recent return of Jacob deGrom to Citi Field gave the SNY team many chances to bring out that approach, with fade shots zoomed in on deGrom staring down Braves batters and skipped commercial breaks to show deGrom’s warmup pitches and trumpet Edwin Díaz’s entrance to close the game.
Ryan Kelly, one of my fellow Willets Pen comrades and a longtime producer at NFL Films, said he noticed that SNY was using cinematic techniques to tell the story of the game in fresh ways this year, often with mosaic or fade shots he hadn’t seen before, which heighten big moments between batter and pitcher. One recent Brandon Nimmo plate appearance caught his eye, a moment where there were three shots put together on the screen: Nimmo in one corner, the pitcher in the other, and below them, a wide shot showing the 60 feet, 6 inches between them.
“That was during a key part of the game, and it really sort of heightened the tension of that moment,” Kelly said during a recent phone call. “[SNY is] taking a very thoughtful, cinematic approach to broadcasting baseball, and I think it totally enhances the experience.”
DeMarsico said that is exactly what he’s been aiming to do.
“An entire genre, the Western, was built on the showdown and high drama and tight shots of faces and wide shots of landscapes. I just was kind of trying to think of how I can adopt that?” he said. “So when I do that triple box with the batter and the pitcher on the bottom, the batter’s face up high and the pitcher’s face on top, that's kind of what I was going for, and I've even introduced a few spaghetti Western musical stings that I mix in periodically to kind of give it that extra jazz.”
Kelly said this reminds him of the approach former NFL Films president Steve Sabol brought to football, where he said his mission was to “bring a new understanding to something that's already been seen — to give a creative treatment to reality.”
But the impressive thing about SNY, Kelly added, is that they are doing it live, in real time. He’s started taking screenshots of some of the most artful moments he sees during broadcasts, many of which are beautiful moments during lulls in the actual action of the game.
“There's another sort of artful shot of a fan in a Keith Hernandez jersey, and you can see the newly retired number in the background, and it's mostly negative space,” he said. “It's mostly sky, and you can see just sort of a sliver of the upper deck in one part of the screen and then you can see the very top of the stadium at the bottom of the screen.”
It reminded him of another Sabol adage: “Art is selected detail.”
To do that kind of artful work in real time requires serious team effort, DeMarsico said, and a willingness to just roll with whatever is happening. It starts at the top, with the spirit and energy that Gary, Keith, Ron, and Steve bring to each broadcast, and goes all the way down to the camera, video, replay, and graphics guys who DeMarsico called “as talented as anybody on the planet.”
“It's a team effort,” he said. “I pick my spots when I inflict a little bit of my personality on the broadcast, but it's really a collaborative effort. And it's live TV. So we are constantly operating in chaos, and I've learned to just embrace the chaos and let things go.”
For example, he relayed that the Steve Gelbs spot with the cup snake in Chicago was actually a “happy accident.” Steve had gone to the section where the cup snake began, and it was too loud for him to hear exactly what he was being asked in his earpiece.
“Our producer was trying to talk to Steve about, ‘Hey, is it gonna be okay for you to go over there?’ And Steve misunderstood him and thought he was asking him if it was okay for an interview,” DeMarsico said. “So we weren't supposed to interview that guy. It just kind of happened. We got really lucky because you never want to give the microphone to anybody and just stand there, especially somebody building, you know, the beer cup snake. So that was very lucky and fortunate and it worked out great.”
The SNY team also takes great care, I’ve noticed, to give each game a strong sense of environment. It’s something DeMarsico said he was taught by producer Greg Picker, to establish a sense of place, using shots of the New York skyline or film from around the ballpark when they’re on the road.
“My job as a director is always to put you in the best seat possible, and in these cities it's always interesting to me what's around the ballpark, within the city,” he said, adding that on a recent trip to Los Angeles, he went to the Academy Museum to collect some film for inserts in the game.
“I love doing stuff like that. It’s just part of the mesh of the broadcast,” DeMarsico said. “You know, it's like, everyone has a little role, and it's like freeform jazz.”
Trivia answer: According to Baseball Reference, the Mets gave out the highest signing bonus of the 1981 first round, $127,500 to Terry Blocker, who did progress to Flushing in 1985, but only for 18 games. He was dealt to Atlanta for a player to be named (eventually Kevin Brown — no, not that Kevin Brown) in 1987. The top two picks, Matt Moore (Mariners) and Joe Carter (Cubs) went on to long major league careers, but never with the Mets.
The WAR leader of the 1981 first round, Kevin McReynolds (No. 6, Padres) did of course find his way to Queens, as did Daryl Boston (No. 7, White Sox) and Dick Schofield (No. 3, Angels). The rest of the top 10 picks — Matt Williams (again, not that Matt Williams), Bob Meacham, and Mark Grant — all did make the majors. That’s a pretty good draft, and one that produced some memorable Mets without the Mets having picked one of them. They did pick Lenny Dykstra in the 13th round, and were able to sign and develop him, unlike the Mets’ 1981 12th-rounder, a pitcher from San Jacinto College in Texas named Roger Clemens.
This was great and shows how baseball doesn't need gimmicks to make the game exciting - just the right kind of storytelling.