Too many closeups?

[sack]

The thread on excessive camera movement brough to mind how much I hate closeups in baseball.
Theres always a close up of the pitchers face between pitches, or the batter kicking dirt off his cletes. There are plenty of times I have heard the announcers talking about something going on in the ballpark, or another player on the field, and all I see is the face of the pitcher.

I enjoy the game of baseball, and there is more to it than just the pitcher and batter. I want to see how the defense is spread out on the field, I want to see how the play progresses, how the fielders react, how the runners run. If it werent for the replay we would hardly see any of the game.

I feel watching on TV that I am missing a good part of the game because of the excessive use of the closeup.

Anyone agree?

 

[buster2]

That's one reason baseball works very well on radio, and is less-suited for TV.

It's very difficult to cover all the angles for baseball because the field is oddly-shaped. Most people want to see the center field camera shot showing the pitcher throwing to the batter. The TV crew has to be very good at picking up where the ball goes when and if it's hit, and they also have to account for the movement of other baserunners (if any), and so on. It can be complex.

This is more easily done in radio because a person can describe moments of chaos better than a director can choreograph six cameras at once. That doesn't mean baseball on TV is bad, it's just more difficult to completely cover at times.

Football, basketball, hockey, and soccer are all played on rectangular surfaces of uniform size. The action is more predictable so a camera shot usually can contain all the pertinent action in one frame - that's not always so in baseball.

Your comments remind me of a complaint I have about basketball coverage. I get very tired of seeing a player score, and the director goes for a closeup of that player as he runs back down the court. Meanwhile the other team is halfway down the court and setting up their own offensive play. If the team is a high-energy team such as the Suns or Mavericks, you may miss a great play from them because the director thought it was more compelling to look at some sweat-drenched jock celebratin his latest dunk. I don't need to see Le Bron's pores or Ginobili's floppy hair, I want to see the ACTION!

 

[toby]

The close up is the least of televised baseball's problems. The biggest is Fox with all the unneeded garbage they throw into the telecast (yes, Tim McCarver and Joe Buck fall into that category) and then there was ESPN's shill like adoration of the pharmacalogical-human hybrid recently which was even worse than McCarver's inane moronic ramblings.