Courtesy of John DeMarsico
On April 28, the Mets walked off the Cardinals in the 11th inning. It was a huge moment, made even bigger because the embattled Mark Vientos delivered the knockout blow in just his second big league game after starting the season in the minors. That night, John DeMarsico, director of SNY’s Mets broadcasts, posted a video of the play that was shot from inside the production truck. It’s something he does occasionally, though this video had a twist: the audio from the triumphant final scene of Moneyball was overlaid on the broadcast.
Walk-Off: A behind-the-scenes featurette #Baseballiscinema pic.twitter.com/ZrgRleH9SB
— John DeMarsico (@JohnDeMarsico)
DeMarisco is renowned for adding cinematic flourishes to SNY’s broadcasts, but when I watched this particular video — hearing dramatic music play as the voices in the truck worked together to decide what shot should come next — I was struck by the way DeMarsico is entrusted with telling the story of the game. SNY’s team is universally acknowledged to be one of the best in the business. At any given moment, DeMarsico can choose multiple shots that would look great and tell the viewer what is going on, but his job is bigger than that. His job is to use those images to craft a narrative.
I reached out to DeMarsico, and he agreed to a somewhat unusual interview. We met over Zoom, and I played him the video one shot at a time, so that he could explain the decision-making process behind each cut. “I tend to post those videos when something interesting happens on the field, or it’s a game-ending play or a go-ahead hit,” he told me. “I love giving people a behind-the-scenes look at what we do. Because a lot of the times if you’re doing this job correctly, the broadcast is sort of invisible to the viewers at home. I don’t necessarily buy into that whole-heartedly.”
DeMarsico was enthusiastic and funny. At the end of our conversation, I told him that when I wrote about cleat cleaners, I’d had trouble finding footage of a player actually using one. When the Mets took the field that night, literally the first shot of the game was Camera Fourteen with a closeup of the cleat cleaner; the broadcast dutifully waited more than 30 seconds for Sean Manaea to give it a tap with his right cleat before cutting away. The cross-dissolve in the GIF below is only there because I can’t upload a clip long enough for the entire shot:
DeMarisco’s comments were wide-ranging. He was game for the conceit of the interview, explaining up front that telling the story of the game means, “putting yourself in position to a) cover the action, make sure you don’t miss anything on the field, and b) sort of take a few chances here and there to capture a human moment, whether it’s a reaction on the bench, a reaction from a player on the field, a fan, whatever the case is. What you’re really trying to do and what resonates with the viewers at home, other than the play on the field, are those human moments.” He talked about the assignments that each camera might have in a given game situation, and lavished praise on just about every aspect of SNY’s broadcast team, saying, “It’s like an orchestra. It just kind of happens. You put in the years of work, and you’ve got the people in the right spots, and you have the experience. You’re surrounded by such talent that the music just kind of flows.” He talked about broadcasting other sports, about when the video needs to do less in order to let the announcers have the spotlight, and about how some broadcasts are have been adversely affected by cost-cutting moves that reduced the size of the production team on road trips. The text below has been edited and condensed for the sake of brevity. Because I want to let DeMarsico do the talking, my questions are included, italicized, only when they’re necessary to provide context for his answers.
We’ll talk mechanics. So any ball in play, since I have to get to that Camera Two so quickly — that’s the high home camera; he covers the whole field. It’s the most important camera on the field… I don’t have to ready that camera because [technical director Seth Zwiebel’s] finger is already on the button. The only time this kind of play has a variation is if for some reason, if a guy hits a no-doubt home run in a big moment, I will linger on the center field camera, which is Camera Four, a little longer to see if I can get the hitter’s reaction… That wasn’t the case here, because this is sort of wall scraper. So it’s just a traditional cut to Two on this one, and he pushes to the pitcher for the reaction shot.
There are assignments for every baseball play that each camera has. And on some days, we have upwards of 20 cameras. Not every one of those cameras has a human being behind the lens, but we have up to 20 cameras on a given day. So on this kind of play, once the ball leaves the ballpark, all assignments more or less go out the window. Because you’re not afraid of missing anything on the field, baseball-wise. Because the game’s over. So as soon as that ball leaves the ballpark, I go into what we talked about before, capturing the emotion of the play. Trying to squeeze 30,000 fans, 50 ballplayers, and all of the emotion happening in that building into a 25-second sequence. And so, that’s what separates a walk-off play from a normal baseball play, because if this is a double in the gap in the seventh inning, I’ve got to make sure that I’m covering the action. I have to almost prioritize the baseball more than the emotion of the game.
Each camera position has its own little nuance and what makes it good. That position’s so hard because there’s not really any — it’s really up to the camera operator. I can talk to a guy before a game starts and kind of go through my philosophy on that camera. And on that camera, wide is never wrong because you don’t want to miss anything, but that camera offers a lot of nuance. Especially on home runs, it’s hard because your instinct is to track the ball, and you don’t want to go too high because if you lose the outfielder, you lose the warning track, then fans lose all perspective of where the ball’s going. So an ordinary fly ball may look like it’s going 50 rows deep, and you don’t want to do that.
So on this kind of play, as soon as that ball leaves the yard, as soon as it’s clear that it’s a home run that lands in either a fan’s glove or hits a wall or whatever, I have a few decisions to make. Do I want to cut to a shot of the guy that hit the ball, the pitcher who gave up the home run, or, depending on what my cameras are isolating, the bench or fans? Given what Vientos has been through in the last year, the clear choice here is to cut to the batter’s reaction. And it paid off here. He was ecstatic about what just took place, and it was kind of just the beginning, as you’ll see further on in this sequence, of the pent-up frustration just spilling out of him in this trip around the bases.
You know it’s funny. The Cards broadcast, they stayed on center field, which paid off because his glove fell right down next to him— Yes, we’ll talk about — there’s a couple shots that I wish that I’d got during this sequence too…
