ESPN’s new MLB alt-cast Sunday Night Baseball Statcast Edition Powered By Google Cloud debuts this Sunday, July 21 at 7 p.m. ET, airing on ESPN2 alongside the traditional broadcast with the team of Kevin Brown, Trevor May and Mike Petriello. The trio, plusESPNVice President of ProductionPhil Orlins, were made available to media earlier today to unveil the new approach.
PHIL ORLINS: I’m going to do a brief overview of what we’re doing and why we think it’s important and worthwhile to do and show you guys a few looks at some of the graphics or skins that will make this show differentiated.
First of all, on the introduction side, obviously Alex mentioned our talent. We’ll talk a little bit more about that, and I’ll turn over the vast majority of this call and let you guys speak with Kevin and Mike and introduce Trevor, who we’re very, very excited about.
Also joining the call is Joe McCoy, who’s our producer of the Statcast telecast, and I also invited Jeff Stern. Jeff is from TruMedia. He’s got a really crucial role in building and developing some of the new graphics and real-time data that’s going to be part of these telecasts. Thank you, Jeff.
I’m not sure if he’s on, but Jim Thomas from MLB was also invited, who’s got a really crucial role in a lot of the Statcast 3D and how we integrate that coverage into the telecast, as well.
Why are we here? Why are we doing this? Obviously there’s a long great history with us going back to, I don’t know, 2017 or 2018 when we started doing Statcast alt cast on Wild Card and a couple other MLB games. From the outset, we tried to differentiate what we did and do a high-level progressive broadcast with it. They were immediately well-received.
Our initial response both from viewership and social was kind of off the charts, especially the social aspect of it.
We’re happy to be kind of returning to those roots, as we were for Home Run Derby and we are here for this, as well.
The way I look at this, we design our primary broadcast to reach the largest group of baseball fans, baseball viewers. So we designed that to reach somewhat progressive, what we call die-hard viewers, as well as our traditionalists, and then we face a choice if we want to differentiate with an alt-cast, do we want to do something that’s designed for a more casual viewer, and there’s obviously been examples of that, two years of KayRod cast, for example, other shows that are out there, Bird, Taurasi and Manning, and other things that are on other networks.
The other direction to go is to go to the die-hards directly, the new schoolers and the more progressive end of our viewers, and really attack it with something that’s designed to be progressive, innovative, and look to the future of the way people are — the most aggressive and sometimes younger baseball fans are approaching this. That’s what we’ve done in the past with this, and that’s what we are excited to be doing again here.
As for our choice, like I said, we’ve done KayRod cast the last couple of years. We wanted to take a different turn to it this year with Statcast and go on the more aggressive and progressive route with that. We’re happy to be able to do that for sure.
Without further, I’m going to move to sharing screen here. I have a disabled participant screen sharing, Alex. Is that something you can fix quickly? Maybe I’m okay now. Got it. Thank you, Alex.
So we don’t want to make this too wonky, but when we do a show like this, the priority is certainly to differentiate the telecast. The single most important aspect of what we do revolves around the talent and the commentary. Obviously as you guys know, Kevin Brown, Mike Petriello has been with us from the outset of our Statcast broadcast, and Trevor May, you guys will talk to them in more detail.
I will just say, I couldn’t be more — possibly be more excited about this group. I really thought a lot particularly about who would fill Trevor’s role. Talked to a number of people about it, and candidly the moment I really started listening to Trevor on MLB Radio and on his podcast that he’s doing on Rates & Barrels, I realized that he was in a completely different space than any recently retired ex-player out there.
Candidly, I can’t really even put into words, kind of mind-boggling his level of sophistication within the Statcast environment. It’s really more, to be honest, aligned with, like, Mike’s way of looking at the game and thinking about the game, in many cases, mixing in his own player experiences.
Utterly crucial, this group, and really the single most important thing we do is the differentiated way we talk about the game and look at the game in a progressive manner.
Having said that, it’s also crucial for us to differentiate the telecast in a visual manner, as well. I just wanted to show a couple things on that as we go here.
First off, from a graphics standpoint, you’ll see many, many graphics that borrow from the Statcast world, specifically the Baseball Savant world, things that look skill set based, Statcast-type metrics, percentile metrics. Again, these visuals, for those of you who are in and out of Baseball Savant, will recognize them, are collaborative with MLB Statcast, with Baseball Savant, and you can see that look established here.
Obviously there’s more on the Baseball Savant page, but these will have up to six of these percentile-based visual graphics really for every player that we talk about during the telecast. These kind of replace the basic introductory — you know, average home runs and RBI type graphics that you might have seen in the past.
The next huge step we took forward — and this is really Jeff Stern and our graphics team here — is live data implementation within the course of the telecast. So this is part of really every pitch of how we cover the game. Jeff and his team at TruMedia built us a pitch predictor which varies by count based on the pitcher’s repertoire and the type of hitter that he’s facing, who he is and who he’s facing, and basically for the first time ever we’ll show on a percentage basis the likelihood of his top three most likely pitches to be thrown in any given situation for each pitcher that’s in the game.
Along with that are graphics that show where he typically throws, that most likely of those three pitches, in this case, Cole Irvin with the four-seam fastball in this particular example, and also the pitcher’s damage or hot zone against that individual pitch. So that’s the sort of introductory graphic to each pitch that’s thrown within the game. Obviously like the graphics look progressive, new looking and whatnot.
Then that’s followed by after the pitch, Statcast metrics on the pitch itself. So velocity is in there, the pitch location, which you’ve already seen on the screen, as well, and then the vertical break compared to the Major League Baseball average and the horizontal break compared to the major league average for that pitch type and similar velocity, which is also featured on Baseball Savant.
That’s kind of the back and forth during the game on the pitching, so introducing the likely pitch, followed by the outcome of that pitch, and definitely a visually new way to look at it.
The last aspect of visual differentiation is really the implementation of avatar-based Statcast replays. We’re working right now to deliver these in the quickest possible time frame. As of a few days ago, we were down to about 30 seconds after a play happened. We think by the time we get to air on Sunday, we’ll be down to 15 or 20 seconds and be able to incorporate these types of replays within the standard game coverage, which I think is considerably new and groundbreaking.
So just a pretty simple, cool example, again, with avatars in place, cameras can go anywhere. Here’s a quick look at what a hit or a home run might look like. These are both faster than they’ve ever been delivered for other broadcasts before and quite new in some of the graphic elements to them. We would hope to be looking at real video, home run swing, things of that nature, and then go to this type of replay.
The other huge aspect here is that we’re going to be able to, through the use of the avatars — this borrows some from some of the cartoon-type broadcasts we’ve done, like Big City Greens and stuff, but this is with more legitimately oriented avatars — be able to put a camera essentially anywhere quickly to watch a play through the animated characters, 3D animated characters as avatars.
Still somewhat of a work in progress, but the ability to look at multiple camera angles and essentially go down, watch a stolen base from a catcher’s perspective, watch an outfielder stumble from his perspective, things of that nature.
That’s just a quick overview, and I’ll turn it over to you guys. I wanted you to have a little bit of a sense of what the visuals are going to look like and what the overall goal is here, so Alex, I’ll turn it back to you and let everyone go.
THE MODERATOR: Thanks, Phil. We’ll turn to the question portion of the media conference call.
Q. Phil, you talked a little bit about this, so I’m curious how you guys — you’ve kind of come up with these two categories of alt-cast and what you’ve learned about the popularity of each, the goals of each, and going forward is it something where you would like to offer both or alternate during a season? How do you think about the mixing and matching of the casual and the more die-hard alt-cast?
PHIL ORLINS: I think the die-hard, Statcast alt-cast, I do want to be clear, when we look at overall performance of alt-cast, it’s not like miraculous, but it’s always been on the high end of what we’ve delivered from an audience standpoint.
I think you could make a case absolutely to kind of narrow cast the different sections of audience. It may not be practical or practical today to do — there’s only so many networks that are out there that people are interested in this type of stuff might have the energy to go find, so we kind of have to choose one or the other.
The other thing I really like about it is that it really allows us to push the envelope, try new things, and those new things really change the way we do broadcasting across the board. There are just aspects of what we started doing with Statcast baseball coverage years ago that are part and parcel to the way we look at the game. It’s always an evolutionary process, and it’s an incredible real-life opportunity to take new chances, try new things, and find out what can work and push ourselves to get better.
Q. Trevor, Phil touted how much kind of statistical literacy you came to the table with. I’m interested, when you’re pitching in a game, how much access to these stats did you have, and how receptive were other teammates to learning from them?
TREVOR MAY: That’s a great question. So I had access to pretty much everything we have and more, honestly. We’re using a lot of the same tools that I used to create my own scouting reports and things.
But I used public facing Baseball Savant quite a bit in my scouting reports. I’m always open to different ways that these things are presented, and some of the guys that I was hanging out with the most at the field every day was in the analytics department. I think I’m a pretty big nerd at heart, and those were my guys.
I used a lot of data, and there was — at first I didn’t understand why all the other guys weren’t as into it as I was, so I had to find ways to communicate it, which has kind of brought me here. But over time I think, the younger generation especially, the guys who are drafted off of a lot of their TrackMan data and a lot of their other metrics, because that’s what projectability has become, it backs up that idea. When I was drafted, it’s like, you’re 6’5″, you’re probably going to throw hard, and we’re going to go off that, and now they can tell whether or not it’s in the tank or not based on the physics.
The guys are a little bit more sensitive to that and have a better understanding coming in, and it was getting more and more normal, I think — not to maybe my level. I think that I would be probably an outlier. Even in 10 years when it’s just everywhere and everyone is doing it, I’d still probably be one of the guys that relied on it a little bit more than others. But it is definitely something that people are factoring in, making educated guesses on how they can improve, and everyone is trying to add pitches, and the speed at which you can do that stuff is really fast now.
It’s almost like if you’re not doing it, you’re probably going to fall behind and you’re not going to have your job for long.
Yeah, guys are coming along, but it’s a work in progress for sure. I’m still talking to a lot of guys, too. Guys are reaching out to me and asking about things I’ve talked about in videos and things. So that’s an encouraging sign.
Q. Phil and any of the talent who want to contribute here, as well, to this, obviously the Kay Rod cast has been on for the last year or two, and now moving to the Statcast, what elements of that show are you going to blend into this kind of data-driven information broadcast that you’ll be presenting to viewers?
PHIL ORLINS: What elements like a KayRod cast are we going to —
Q. Yeah, like the conversational nature and how they would talk about the game in a more casual way, how are you going to blend that into the Statcast driven broadcast?
PHIL ORLINS: Yeah, this is by definition, like, designed to be extreme — extra focused on the game, whereas the casual personality-driven alt-cast is to some degree — large degree, guess driven, so in that sense it’s probably as dramatic a divergence as you could have.
But I think to your point, which was a good point, we still are doing it from Seaport. It’s a great place for us to work with great technological advantages and a very comfortable working environment, and I do think that the way we talk about the game — the way we talk will be by nature — it’s tough to say this because like Carl and — I’m not trying to diminish — Carl and David and Coney and Eduardo Perez are very, very conversational based around a skeleton of game play-by-play that Carl provides. I would say this will be also very conversational. The nature of it is to have deeper, more insightful conversations and let that go and let that happen around the game.
So I think in that sense it will be conversational like K-Rodcast, but in terms of the topics and depth of conversation about the game, it’s kind of a strong divergence from the casual personality-driven approach.
KEVIN BROWN: I’ll just say briefly that I’m excited and curious to see where the conversation takes us because while Mike and Trevor and I have been preparing for this for a while, this is going to be the first time the three of us work together. I’m anxious in a good way to see where the conversations take us.
I have an idea of what I want to talk about. I have a lot of ideas about what I want to engage these two about. Obviously Trevor has such a unique perspective here. I’m sorry I just used the phrase “such a unique.” Alex, please strike that from the transcript. Mike has been doing these kinds of shows for a long time, and Mike and I have done a couple of Home Run Derbies together. We just did one on Monday. So I love the way his mind works, I love the way Trevor’s mind works, I love the way they see the game.
I think finding the mix of play-by-play versus diving super deep into a particular pitch or pitcher versus hitter matchup for three, four batters, if the moment feels right for it, is what’s going to excite me and interest me.
I just want to see what directions this show goes in because with these guys, with Joe as our producer, and with the creativity we have behind it, I think there are tons of different paths down which this thing could diverge.
Q. Phil, clearly the graphic avatar replay seemed to be a magnitude more sophisticated than you’ve done before. I’m wondering how much MLB was involved in this, and then you made that reference to Toy Story and so forth. Is Beyond Sports also involved? Any more details or partners you could mention there would be interesting.
PHIL ORLINS: That’s great. I’m glad you asked. First of all, I think they’re all cousins in a way. You’re taking data and you’re translating that in near real time into animated characters now in a way that are incredibly different. One of them is taking, say, hockey or football players and turning them into literally cartoon characters, and grandma Alice and whatnot, whereas another is designed to be closer to real-life characters. But at the core, they’re both taking the media data and transitioning it to some form of realistic animation of the movement and so forth on the field. So they are related in that way.
As far as the partners go, great question. Really the partners in this case are, of course, MLB and their Statcast team, led by Jim Thomas in our world and Simon Shaddington and others, and MLB Statcast collaborates with a company called Virtual Eye that used to be ARL or Animation Research Limited out of New Zealand, so that’s really where, to your question about beyond sports, they’re definitely very similar jobs in a way, work in a way.
Virtual Eye, they’ve been with baseball for Statcast from the inception. They’ve really done all their visual development. They have a great place in golf, America’s Cup, cricket, things of that nature, and do a tremendous amount of analytical data visualizations in those areas, and obviously we’ve had great success working with beyond sports who’s a already company on the cartoon animations and we’ll continue to do so in the future.
Q. For Kevin, I’m wondering, you do a lot of more traditional broadcasts, as well. How do you balance that approach and the Statcast approach? How differently do you approach a Statcast broadcast?
KEVIN BROWN: I think it’s going to be less of a jump now than when I even five years ago started calling games with the Orioles. Every local major league broadcast is supported by Statcast, and we get pitch mixes and we get replays and we get out spot pitch type and swing speed and all kinds of videos that the Statcast folks will send to us en masse and to every other local RSN.
We do a lot of that stuff already. I’m interested in — I’m on everybody’s Baseball Savant page all the time, so I’m just naturally more interested in these sorts of things.
It will be more of that, to state the absolute obvious, but I think the difference in this is going to be with the Orioles when I’m working with Ben McDonald or Jim Palmer, those guys are interested in this type of thing. Even though it’s been a while since they’ve played, they take time to learn about the modern game. They take time to talk to players and coaches and people in the front office. Obviously they don’t approach it with the same analytical bent that Trevor and Mike are going to do here, so I do think our conversations just by nature will be different.
I don’t think it’s going to be a huge, huge jump, honestly, just because we started to incorporate so much of that stuff already.
This will be a bigger diversion of my thesis and mission statement with a lot of these games that these numbers don’t have to be scary. Yes, we’re going to flood the screen with a lot of stuff that might look a little bit frightening to the casual viewer. That’s okay. My goal with Orioles games is to take numbers that seem bigger or scary and show people why these are relevant and why this matters to the modern game, and hopefully enhance their understanding of what is a collection of some of the greatest athletes in the world.
I think we’re going to have more tools to do that here, but I don’t think it is necessarily a sizable leap from the usual stuff I do.
MIKE PETRIELLO: I just want to jump in on something Kevin said there. I’ve done like 15 or so of these shows over the years with ESPN, and the main premise has always been this can be fun and not scary and not an algebra lesson. People worry about this show is it’s just going to be reciting launch angles, and we’re not going to do that.
I think it’s been like three years almost since we actually did a regular season game, one of these. Not a regular season but a real game, the 2021 Wild Card game.
What I’m most interested here because the previous games were with Benetti and Eduardo Perez, and they were great teammates and good friends and all that, but having Trevor is such a different perspective from Eduardo. Obviously pitcher versus hitter is one thing; Trevor played as recently as last year, whereas Eduardo is much more old school. And they bring different things to the table.
But I think that’s so exciting to me is that we can talk about this stuff and then also say, hey, Trevor, you played like 10 minutes ago; what was in the bullpen. And I think we’re going to get through a lot of that while also focusing on the game at hand. It’s still Red Sox and Dodgers, and can’t lose sight of that.
PHIL ORLINS: I would just add, I viewed Eduardo when he did this role as awesome, and he was analytically curious, interested in everything we were doing, and I view Trevor as analytically immersed, and that’s just a change in the game and the way things have happened really since the birth of Statcast in 2015, that that’s where we are today versus where we are in the late 2010s.
Q. For Trevor, you’re coming over from having played in the major leagues for a while and now you’re going to be broadcasting on a traditional linear platform. What made you want to make this change? I know you’ve done a lot of digital stuff, whether it be on YouTube or podcasts. What’s the appeal of coming over to ESPN?
TREVOR MAY: First of all, I grew up on SportsCenter before school, so ESPN is a big deal in how I grew up with sports. It’s one of those things, like it’s part of a dream I think I had. Maybe I didn’t necessarily visualize myself being on TV per se, but I have definitely been very interested in media over the last decade or so. So that’s an opportunity you just don’t want to pass up.
Also, I’ve kind of been projecting myself in this direction for a while now. I knew that there was going to be some — I was going to do something in this area when I was doing playing, and so I kind of devoted myself over the last few years as I developed my own personal approach to using numbers to put things into action on a field, like that’s how I needed to use numbers, and if people are using those numbers to — if players are using numbers, which a lot of them are, most of them are now, then that is something that I think the viewer experience could really benefit from because it’s so interesting, and I think that people want to feel closer to the game, feel like they’re more — like they have a better understanding and they’re better able to predict what might happen and know why things are happening, and if guys are making decisions like this, that’s just something pretty — it’s not as complicated as it seems, and I’ve always been interested in how do we tell that story. So this is that direct opportunity.
I want to be part of this — I don’t want to say transition, but this burgeoning understanding of how guys are making decisions, how teams are making decisions, so that our armchair GMs at home can be better armchair GMs. I just think that’s fun.
I think that’s one of the major things that is fun about sports, and we see it with the NFL and fantasy football, and everyone likes to feel like they understand how decisions are made, and this is a great way to do it.
I wanted to bring that in, but one thing I’ve always been fascinated with was not the what’s happening. I think we’ve done a good job with that in sports. I think that’s one of the best things about watching sports on TV, but now I think we can do a little bit better job at the why because there’s a lot of really interesting ways to tell those stories, and these two guys have been doing it already, and I just want to add my own context to that equation.
I think I just feel like that’s the missing piece.
In conclusion, Kevin Brown. That’s why.
PHIL ORLINS: I would just say this is the way the game is played for the guys on the field, most of them. Maybe a few outliers who are raw and don’t want to be in the analytics space, but the vast majority of the people in the game, pitchers especially, but hitters, as well, are immersed in this. It is the way front offices make decisions. It’s the way game decisions are made.
Maybe it’s a lofty goal, but I like to think that broadcasts and commentary are and should be aligned with the way decisions are made and players are developed and their skills are developed on the field, and to fail to do that is to fail to address how the game exists in a contemporary way.
So I think it can almost be confusing when you don’t necessarily understand where broadcast — in a way that’s aligned with the way front offices, managers and players are looking at the game. I think it’s an important goal to try to be in step with where the game has moved so quickly.
MIKE PETRIELLO: I saw Chris Sale talking about seam shifted wake this morning, which is wild. Great pitcher, obviously, but someone I would consider to be pretty old school, and if it’s permeated the game to that extent, you’d better be able to know how to explain it to the viewership.
Q. I don’t know what that is so I’ll have to watch to find out.
TREVOR MAY: I’m sure it’ll come up and I can explain it well.
PHIL ORLINS: In fact, there are YouTube videos available, I’m sure, from Trevor on the topic.
The first experience I had with Trevor was during his MLB radio show when Danny had gotten one of his ex-teammates to call in anonymously and ask him silly questions that he clearly knew the answers to, like what seam shifted Wake was and stuff like that.
TREVOR MAY: I didn’t know it was him, either, so he got me.
