Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television (review)

From the earliest experiments in the 1930s to the innovations in advanced media in the twenty-first century, the story of televised baseball is central to our understanding of the development of the game. Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television by James R. Walker and Robert V. Bellamy Jr. sets out to tell this story and does so in a lively and compelling fashion. More than just baseball history shot through a video lens, Center Field Shot is also a history of television shot through the lens of the national pastime.

Walker, a professor of communications at Saint Xavier University, and Bel­lamy, an associate professor of journalism and multimedia arts at Duquesne University, bring a great deal of technical expertise to their exploration of the long and often fraught marriage between baseball and television. Indeed, Center Field Shot is particularly successful at explaining the evolving technical world of televised baseball to the educated lay reader. For example, the authors pay a good deal of attention to the difficulties of shooting a baseball game, as opposed to the relative ease of shooting sports, like football, which are played on a rectangular field. By way of illustration, they include a break-down of a thirty-second shot sequence, recording Fred Lynn's three-run homer in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. What looks like "just one wave of action in a sea of events" to the viewer is not at all simple, note Walker and Bellamy (283). Indeed, filming this "wave of action" required nine shots taken by six cameras. The inclusion of this and many other detailed examples of the nuts and bolts of baseball broadcasting as it evolved provide a valuable window into how the end product we consume is produced.

On an even more technical level, the examination of what may or may not have been the first televised game—the remote broadcast by experimen­tal station W2XBS of a contest between Princeton and Columbia on May 1, 1939, at the New York World's Fair—is particularly informative. According to Walker and Bellamy, RCA, the station's parent company, used this and sev­eral other broadcasts, including those of a prize fight and a tennis tourna­ment, in an attempt to persuade the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to accept their broadcast standard over that of the National Television System Committee's (NTSC). In this case, the authors explain the eventual dominance of the NTSC's 525-line system over RCA's 411-line system clearly and coherently, without getting bogged down in technical detail or obscure terminology. It is of special interest to see the prominent role played by base­ball in the medium's development. This and the other more technical sections of this book provide the reader with a basic education not only in the history of baseball on television, but in the history of television in general.

This is not to say that Center Field Shot is only a technical history. Walker and Bellamy also explore the changing ways in which networks have chosen to present their product to the public. Discussing, for example, NBC's Game of the Week broadcasts in the 1960s, the book details the network's failed experiment with guest announcers. "Inspired by the American League's new 'designated hitters,'" write Walker and Bellamy, "one wag referred to the guest announc­ers as NBC's 'designated hucksters'"(131). Indeed, description of the critical response to the ways in which television chose to cover baseball is effectively woven throughout Center Field Shot. Especially entertaining, as well as infor­mative, are the comments made by the show business organ Variety, which are peppered throughout the book, reinforcing a reality often overlooked by baseball purists, that baseball is, first and foremost, entertainment.

Professional baseball is also a business, and the financial and legal aspects of its relationship to television are also addressed in this...