I went to my first Minor League Baseball game on Friday night! The Single-A Brooklyn Cyclones have a great atmosphere in the Coney Island neighborhood. My colleague Ben Fischer was also there, and he tells me that he’s a big fan of the beer bat.
All four umpires will wear cameras during Fox Sports' broadcast of the 2025 MLB All-Star Game. Courtesy of Fox Sports
It’s no surprise that Fox Sports will bring its A-game to the MLB All-Star Game telecast on Tuesday night, but as SBJ’s Joe Lemire and I found out, there are some unique elements audiences should tune in to see.
This year’s MLB All-Star Game is the first in which all four umpires are wearing a point-of-view camera. That’s in addition to 10 two-way player mics and a reprise of the sport’s longest FlyCam, a 600-foot wire running along the first base line to The Battery beyond Truist Park’s right field seats.
“Baseball has been good partners with us as far as trying to push the game forward, and it’s gone through various iterations,” Judy Boyd, EVP/production at Fox, tells SBJ. “[MLB has] been great about advancing all the things that we want to do to make this game a unique perspective and bring the fan closer to what’s going on in the field. It’s our job to show it on TV and explain it as best we can and show it in its best light.”
The ASG has included a helmet-worn umpire cam for four straight years on Fox, but this week’s edition is believed to be the first baseball game in which the three base umpires are all also donning cameras. All four are from Mindfly, though the base umps will wear BodyCams on their chests, similar to what Mindfly and Fox used in this spring’s UFL.
“It’s really going to give us a look and a feel for the umpires that no one’s ever seen before, and it’s going to give better access to what’s going on, an understanding of what’s happening, and a view and an angle that just haven’t been seen before on a regular basis,” Fox Sports VP/Field Operations and Engineering Brad Cheney told SBJ. “It’s going to be a different viewpoint to really experience the game from the player level.”
Those Mindfly units will also capture audio, but that commentary is likely to be relegated to replays and not live shots.
Getting fancy
Further enhancing the field-level sound are 40 field effects mics and 10 player mics that will be rotated among the All-Stars throughout the game. Cheney said Fox is working with MLB to stay “as flexible as possible” in terms of whom gets outfitted with a mic, given how substitutions and game situations arise. He noted a particular interest in pairing players in the same inning: pitcher vs. batter, teammates taking the field together, etc.
MLB and Fox also will honor Hank Aaron in a presentation commemorating his 715th home run in 1974, when he surpassed Babe Ruth as the all-time home run leader at the time. The live tribute on Fox will recreate the moment with projection mapping and pyrotechnics at the end of the sixth inning, or possibly later, depending on lighting.
A unique crowd-capturing opportunity
FlyCam is the name of Fox’s moving viewpoint tethered to a suspended wire above the field of play. Typically, as in last year’s NLCS and World Series, it runs along a foul line. But this time Fox will repeat what it did for the 2021 World Series and have the cable to One Ballpark Center, the nine-story building extending above the right field bleachers.
The difference, however, is that the sun had long since set by first pitch during the Fall Classic, but the Midsummer Classic will offer daylight into the early innings.
“It really is amazing we’re going to have it in the daylight and see The Battery and see all the people,” Cheney said. “When we were doing this in the past, the sun had gone down at 6pm, and so the whole place is just dark.
“The Battery is a special baseball place,” he added of the large throng expected around the ballpark, and noted that the FlyCam will “traverse from the outside -- where our MLB Emmy-award winning studio crew will be outside in the Battery hosting -- and will move from them into the building and see the game and run up and down the first base foul line.”
In all, Fox is deploying 55 cameras for the broadcast, with six super slow-mos, an aerial view from a helicopter and a drone from Beverly Hills Aerials. Cheney added that the drone would be especially useful in getting unique vantage points during the concerts and other entertainment surrounding the All-Star Game itself, as those events often have a space between stage and fans where the drone can safely roam.
“The world of drones and technology has allowed us to do aerials in a very intimate manner,” said Boyd. “They were the first sport to let us do it in an All-Star game, then we did it in postseason, and then now we’re doing things during competition.”
Beverly Hills Aerial will again fly a drone for new camera angles in Fox Sports' MLB All-Star Game coverage. Courtesy of Fox Sports
Here are some things that stood out from the conversations.
1) Relevance of the All-Star Game
“I tap back into the feeling I had as a kid watching the guys line up,” Davis said. “Whatever kind of feeling inspired me as a kid makes it just as relevant as it’s ever been, because it inspires so many of those sentimental feelings for me.”
Flores added: “Maybe most importantly is the game itself, the All-Star Game itself. What is shown and seen on the field most closely resembles the actual game. It most closely resembles regular-season/postseason action that our fans see. No disrespect to the other sports’ [All-Star games], but sometimes you do lose the competitive edge.”
Pointing to ratings, Flores noted that MLB All-Star Game outrates many other professional leagues (my colleague Austin Karp confirms the Midsummer Classic -- with 7.44 million viewers last year -- still handily beats the 4.7 million for both the NBA All-Star Game on TNT/truTV or the Pro Bowl across ABC/ESPN/DisneyXD).
2) Can “regionalism” be a good thing for the sport?
Davis, who also calls Dodgers games for Spectrum Sportsnet, calls baseball’s regional fandom a benefit for the sport. “Tribal is a good thing,” he said. “Feeling like your baseball team [is] part of your life.”
3) Ownership being one reason MLB Network remains stable
Flores attributes MLB Network’s stability and longevity to support from the league and owners.
“That’s where it starts,” he said. “If you don’t have that, it makes it very, very difficult. ... The other thing is we have a lot of talented people that are at MLB Network. We’re kind of small -- I always like to say we’re small in numbers, but we’ve got a lot of talent.”
4) Maybe an in-season tournament could spice things up for MLB
“The best thing about baseball, but the hardest thing about baseball -- 162 games is long,” said Davis. “When teams get off to bad starts, that’s a really long season. There’s ways to play around with that where it could be a really good thing. [You’re] starting an entirely new era if you do that.”
Christen Press (l) and Tobin Heath will look to grow their media brand after selling their podcast to Audacy. RE-CAP PODCAST
Former USWNT star Tobin Heath was busy last week -- officially retiring (three years after her final pro game) and selling the podcast she co-hosts with her wife, Christen Press, to Audacy on the same day.
“A little unorthodox three years after playing, but I finally came to some kind of peace and understanding,” said Heath. “I hope that emotionally with this, I continue to create space that otherwise was consumed by this idea of returning to football [with] creations and ideas. I’ve been dedicating my time to continuing to learn to be a great entrepreneur and CEO. I’m really excited to continue to grow the universe of [The RE-CAP Show] and then just continuing to find ways to invest time into the things I care about.”
The podcast’s acquisition is just the first step to position “RE” as a larger media brand in women’s sports.
“We want to just throw gas on [it],” said Press. “We’re making these moves, and it’s all part of a larger movement. In a lot of ways, even when you think about the ‘competition,’ we’re all in this movement together.”
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told SBJ’s Mike Mazzeo that “real progress” has been made on a short-term national media rights deal, though it will not be done by Tuesday’s All-Star Game as he originally speculated. “I had a really busy week last week in Sun Valley. Everybody really that’s in the mix was there. Made real progress,” Manfred told SBJ. “I was hoping it was going to be done by now, but it’ll be shortly.”
MLB is seeing its strongest viewership numbers in years heading into the All-Star break, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp. Fox is having its best numbers since 2021 (2.06 million viewers) and is up 1%. ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball” package is at its best point since 2017 (1.75 million viewers) -- and is up 11% year-over-year. TBS/truTV is seeing its best numbers since 2015 for non-exclusive games on Tuesday nights, averaging 377,000 and up 17% over last year. For the out-of-market package on MLB.TV, audience numbers are at their best point yet.
I’ve been enjoying “SportsCenter: 50 States in 50 Days” on ESPN. Coming up with unique stories for every state is no easy task, and tonight, die-hard Braves fan Elle Duncan is back in her hometown of Atlanta for the Home Run Derby. Honestly though, as an Atlanta native, I prefer the old Turner Field over the new Truist Park.
At the Liberty-Dream game in Brooklyn yesterday, I spotted a fan wearing an orange “Everyone Watches the WNBA” shirt. I assumed it was a knockoff of media company Togethxr’s lucrative “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports” brand, only to learn from a few sources today that the shirt is a genuine product and a collaboration with Nike. It leaked early on TikTok, but will be officially announced Thursday morning.
Friday night’s trilogy fight between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano at MSG (streaming on Netflix) was a bit of a snooze-fest, but Netflix didn’t face the same buffering and streaming problems that Jake Paul and Mike Tyson faced in Netflix’s first big boxing promotion. However, my colleague Austin Karp had some interesting info on the reported numbers for the bout -- which may not be as high as Netflix and MVP claim.
The FIFA Club World Cup just wrapped up Sunday, and we’ll get viewership numbers for TNT and Univision on Tuesday (it also was streamed for free on DAZN). Beyond the linear telecasts, something that struck me was a partnership DAZN did with Meta Quest for the games in VR. Facebook was never really successful with live sports, but maybe the Meta Quest could be a way the company gets more involved in the business (like what NASCAR did with the Daytona 500).
This week’s SBJ cover story from my colleague Bill King is on a sports media legend -- longtime HBO Sports exec Ross Greenburg (as part of our Champions Class of 2025). The one number you need to know: The man has 56 Sports Emmys.
The global box office for “F1” is now at $393.4 million after this weekend, which has the film at No. 8 globally among all films this year to date, per Box Office Mojo. A little north of 65% of its box office has been outside the U.S. It could actually pass both Marvel releases this year (it’s already passed the $382 million for “Thunderbolts” and is approaching the $415.1 million that “Captain America: Brave New World” got).
F1 Management is aiming to continue F1 TV in the U.S. under its next media deal, per a source cited by SBJ’s Adam Stern, raising the possibility that two OTT streaming services will be available to watch the series next year.
Cooper Flagg’s NBA Summer League debut wasn’t enough to get Mavericks-Lakers over 1 million viewers, but it was good enough for the fourth-best Summer League audience on record, notes Karp. ESPN drew 955,000 viewers for Flagg vs. Bronny James, with a peak audience of 1.12 million viewers on Thursday night.
Stern this week also profiles Joe Hand Promotions, which acts as a broker between major sports leagues and broadcasters on one hand and thousands of commercial establishments -- including chains and mom-and-pop bars across America -- on the other.
