The Art of Losing
A conversation with SNY Mets broadcast director John DeMarsico on making beautiful television out of a disastrous season, finding inspiration from Hulk, and how the pitch clock affected broadcasting
Last summer, just before the All-Star break, I spoke with SNY broadcast director John DeMarsico about SNY’s artful visual storytelling and the Mets’ winning season. DeMarsico had recently garnered attention for his broadcasting of Jacob deGrom’s elite pitching (and elite warm-up, iconically set to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man”), as well as for his viral broadcast of closer Edwin Díaz’s “Trumpets” entrance.
For DeMarsico, the two pitchers were the leading men of the movie he was making every night. This year, both of them are gone, and the high expectations for the 2023 team did not become reality. The Mets have a 64-75 record, and the list of lost pitchers has grown ever longer. It’s been painful, and for the first time in my near-decade of dedicated Mets fandom, I took a weeks-long break from watching games.
But recently, with the weather on the verge of cooling and the end of the season looming, I found myself tuning in again. The Mets haven’t gotten better, but I missed the broadcast, and I don’t mean just the booth (though the booth, of course, remains perfect). One recent shot, playing with perspective through a wine glass, and another, the very next night of the full moon overlaying a shot of the field, reminded me that no matter how bad the Mets are, the Mets broadcast is worth tuning into every night.
So this week, I called DeMarsico again to catch up about the art of losing. Our conversation was fascinating enough that I couldn’t pick specific quotes, so you get a full Q&A. You’re welcome.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Since we last talked, you guys have gotten so much attention and so much coverage for the work that you're doing. How has life changed for you and broadcasting changed for you over the last year? And what has stayed the same?
Well, I have to give you credit, you were first.
I'll take it. [Editor’s note: Subscribe to Willets Pen for more niche scoops :)]
It's been insane. Obviously last season, it helped that the team won over 100 games and they had that exciting last couple months. And so it sort of coincided with all the attention that we were getting, and that sort of carried over into this season with all the preseason expectations that the team had and, you know, we did our thing to start the year and it's been really cool. It's interesting that people have not only enjoyed the baseball side of things, but also the broadcast. It’s always been the case with Gary, Keith, and Ron. They've been voted the most popular group blah, blah, blah, you know, in baseball for the last, I don't know how, however many years, but to kind of have the spotlight shown on the technical side of things, it's been really cool. And I'm just glad people have enjoyed the stuff that we're doing as a group.
As you were saying, a lot of what we talked about last year was that the Mets won 100 games! They were amazing. I remember you telling me about how inspiring it was to broadcast such exciting baseball, and obviously it's not the same experience this year. So how has it been? What's it like to make these beautiful broadcasts for a really miserable Mets team?
We work for the Mets TV network, and I grew up a Mets fan. We've all done losing seasons before — this isn't something new. Obviously, expectations were high this season, but I've been doing Mets games for SNY since 2009. There have been a lot of bad seasons since then. So this really isn't anything new for us, covering a team that is not necessarily postseason bound. We always try to be a more global broadcast anyway. Obviously, we're doing the Mets game. It's better for us if they win, but at the end of the day, we're going to bring our A game every single night.
The beautiful thing about baseball is it's a game played by humans and — for now — officiated by humans. And so every single night, you're inevitably going to get something where you say, “Wow, I've never seen that before,” or “I've never seen a play turn out that way,” or, you know, “I've never seen a fan in the stands with a sign like that or dressed that way.” There's always something there to find that I can bring to the viewer at home that’s going to enhance their experience as a viewer, even though they're watching a game that may be quote-unquote meaningless. I like to bring a little meaning to them at home.
Oh, that's such a beautiful way to say it. I love the exciting moments in a team that isn't bound for the postseason — like, that wonderful game when they blew out the Braves recently was so beautiful. So do you feel like you're able to capture some of those moments that are — I don't know, maybe smaller is the right word? How do you think about celebrating those moments in this season when you aren’t on a postseason trajectory?
I made this analogy earlier this season — I think of the season as a whole as a movie and the leading men last year, at least for me and for some of our production guys, were Edwin Díaz and Jacob deGrom down the stretch, and so you lose Edwin Díaz and you lose Jacob deGrom in the offseason, one to injury and one to free agency. To me, you're almost coming into the season without your two leading men. It’s like you lost your lost Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. So now you have this hodgepodge of character actors that try to, you know, produce something, put something together and although those that those character actors may not be winning any Oscars or World Series, in this case, for the Mets, it could still be an entertaining product, and that's kind of how we have to approach things.
We don't have those showstoppers anymore. We have these rookies who are coming up and they could be something special, and they have had moments where they've shown that, but it's really kind of a jumble and you have to find the gold, because it's there. You have to dig a little bit harder to find it, because it's not always apparent.
There has been one exception to the case, and I think it’s this guy pitching every fifth or sixth day, who has really elevated what we do as a broadcast and as a group — it's Kodai Senga. He's such a unique personality and has this pitch that we've never seen before. And it's become this undeniable phenomenon. It’s got this cool name — the ghost pitch — and so I've sort of embraced that. A few weeks ago, I cut together a Ghostbusters montage of his pitch with some ghostly imagery and I had our SNY studio go out and shoot the Ghostbuster firehouse downtown, and we’ve been rolling that in a little bit to sort of build this guy up. Obviously what he's doing on the field speaks for itself, but it's up to our group as a broadcast to sort of elevate it to the next level and sort of make him the next star of the show.
That's so neat. Last year, we talked about how you were really inspired by Spaghetti Westerns, which have that Jacob deGrom energy to them. It sounds like you've been thinking about Ghostbusters with Kodai Senga, but what other movies, film, television, and art, have been inspiring the broadcast lately?
So this year with the introduction of the pitch clock, I've had to sort of think outside the box as far as setting the scene for these moments of conflict, because there's less time to do it now. So I really wanted to experiment with split screen a lot this year. And it's not necessarily one film in particular or one filmmaker. Obviously, Brian De Palma is a big inspiration for me and I've said that before with his use of split screen, but actually, the movie that has sort of inspired me to take it to the next level came from a very unlikely source: It's the original Hulk by Ang Lee from the early 2000s.
The way that he uses split screen is very stylized and comic book with boxes sliding up, sliding down, sliding over, and so I thought that would be a good way to show the shots that I would usually take over a lot more time without a pitch clock to kind of condense it into a smaller amount of time to be able to show multiple things at one time. So we didn't necessarily lose anything with the pitch clock. The whole season I've been sort of sliding runners in, sliding managers in. I really think there's something there and I think that can be a real asset for me and for our broadcast to implement a little more, because I really do feel like it elevates the moment in a crunch when we're up against the clock — literally.
That's so interesting. Have there been any other adjustments you guys have had to make on the broadcasting side with the new rules?
I was very much against [the pitch clock] in the offseason because I'm a traditionalist. You know, I hate the DH in the National League.
I’m right there with you, John. Everyone who bats should have to play in the field.
So I was against the pitch clock, and I thought it was really gonna hamper what we did best, you know, they're trimming 25 to 30 minutes off of each game and those 25 to 30 minutes of what Major League Baseball was calling “dead time” is kind of where SNY shines, whether it be the mood or the stuff that we're doing or what Steve can do at these parks. That was our time to do our thing that was separate from the game. So it's obviously been an adjustment for us, but our group has been together for so long, and we've been through ups and downs, and it's just another thing. It hasn't been as big of an impact as I thought it would be on the broadcast, because we've come up with new ideas and we've come up with stuff where we’ve adjusted.
And, honestly, I think Gary has said this, because of the pitch clock we may have a few more years of Gary, Keith, and Ron together because they're not going to be doing four hour games every night. There's like two and a half hour games now, which may add to their longevity, because they're not getting any younger.
That's such an interesting case for it. We gotta get Keith home to Hadji on time!
Keith lives at the tip of Long Island. He's got a long drive. It is a long day for him when he does the home games!
I feel like you guys have really helped craft an experience for people and helped fans to watch the game. Do you do you have a sense of kind of like, almost guiding people through this experience of watching baseball?
Absolutely. I don't take it for granted. It's a big responsibility. Not only are we providing entertainment, we're trying to educate the viewers at home and that's always been the motto since before I even started this and with our producer Greg Picker and the director prior. Their motto was educate and entertain and I've taken that to heart. I played baseball my whole life and I sometimes speak baseball better than English. So, the baseball always comes first. All the bells and whistles are fun, and I love to elevate the moment, but the baseball does come first. A lot of broadcasts, they are documenting an event and that's obviously what we're doing too, but there are moments where we can pick our spots to educate and to entertain, that maybe some other broadcasts may not go there, because they haven't they don't have the longevity that our booth production group has.
I view it as the game is 95%, and 95% of our broadcast is going to look like a traditional baseball broadcast that you're going to find anywhere. The other 5% is where I inject a little bit of my personality on the broadcast. That's my time. That's our creative group’s time where we can take some chances and really try to make the broadcast visible. A lot of broadcasts are invisible. They just, you know, they follow the ball, they show the runner scoring. and that's it. So if I'm gonna say something, I want to say it loudly. I want it to be visible. I want to draw the viewer out of their seat. When folks go to the game, I want them to wonder what they're missing on SNY. Whether it be what Gary, Keith, and Ron are saying or what we're doing behind the scenes. I want them to have FOMO!
DeMarsico, at least in my experience, is succeeding on the FOMO front. The day after we spoke, I went to the Mets game in person at Nats Park, and wondered, amid the home run parade, what I was missing on SNY. I was right to wonder: Steve Gelbs had interviewed a dog*.
*I would be remiss not to note that it was not just any dog, but the dog of beloved Mets twitter friend and A Pod of Their Own host Allison McCague, BLUE! We love Allison and Blue, and urge you to contribute to APOTO’s annual Dollars 4 Dingers fundraiser to support the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
