We’re going to start with a little quiz. Here’s how it works. I’ll show you a short video clip. There’s something weird about the clip. Don’t make it full screen, at least on your first viewing. I just want you to see whether you can spot what exactly that weird thing is. Maybe you’ll catch it the first time you watch. Maybe it’ll take a few more views. Don’t scroll down too far or you’ll see the answer in the paragraph after the video, and that would defeat the point of our little exercise. Ready? Here we go.
Did you see it? Did you not see it? Am I just vamping for two more paragraphs in order to give you a better chance of watching the video without spoiling the surprise? Maaaaaybeeeee. OK, here’s the answer: There’s no baseball in that clip. You can pause it at any point to check. I removed the ball, frame by frame. I took it out of Charlie Morton’s hand during his windup, I erased it from the air on its way to the plate, and I plucked it from the sky as it descended into Yankee Stadium’s right field bleachers. I didn’t manipulate this video because I was planning on writing about it. I was just fooling around in Photoshop. I thought it would be funny. But then I showed the clip to someone, and they didn’t notice anything remarkable about it. So I sent it to another person, then a third, and then a fourth. I edited another clip and sent it along too. This one wasn’t a home run, but a double play.
Only one of those four people, Daniel R. Epstein of Baseball Prospectus, noticed that the ball was missing, and even he wasn’t positive of what he’d seen. “This is going to sound weird,” he texted back as I kept pressing him to watch again and look for the anomaly, “but I can’t see the ball during the pitch.” When I told him that was the answer, he wrote back, “Wait seriously??” To be certain, video quality played a role here. I was mostly texting the videos to people at 540p, and they were mostly watching on their phones. I’m sure this would’ve been much easier to spot at full resolution on a bigger screen. And later on, a few people did catch the manipulation on the first or second viewing. Still, the result of this impromptu experiment left me staggered.
Bob Carpenter is in his 41st year calling major league games and his 19th year with the Nationals. He told me about a game when he was forced to rely on the movements of the fielders to intuit the location of the ball. It was getaway day in Atlanta on September 21, 2022. The combination of a 12:20 p.m. start, an extremely bright day, and the fact that the right field line in Truist Park points nearly due South meant that the sun was shining directly into the eyes of everyone in the press box. “It was extremely hard to see the ball,” said Carpenter. “And I couldn’t rely on my monitor a lot either because it was so bright in the booth that we were putting cardboard shades over the monitor and going MacGyver on the thing with duct tape and all that, trying to shade…”
