Have Some Fun Watching This Old Cubs-Dodgers Game With Us: Part 1 - The Broadcast

[Matthew Trueblood]

It's a holiday weekend. With the long desert of the offseason still stretched out before us, allow yourself an oasis and flip on a game from May 1990. The internet is, in some ways, a marvelous and joyous thing.

Image courtesy of YouTube

I refuse to be starved for baseball. It's healthy, sometimes, to deny oneself constant indulgence in vices, but I find my addictive love of the game too strong to stay away from it for long, now that the world wide web has made it possible to luxuriate in games anywhere from 10 to 45 years old almost on demand. When winter hits, we're not commanded to hibernate and make do only with the baseball we soaked up all summer. We have the option to treat summer as eternal and spin our way back in time, to some game we've never seen before, or had long forgotten. We can find all kinds of old baseball that is, nonetheless, new to us, and experience it the same way we might have if we were years older or hadn't had school that day.

For this privilege, we have to thank (profusely) the myriad amateur archivists who post games by the dozens on YouTube. It's a treasure trove, and while a few accounts have been taken down over the years due to apparent copyright infringement, the league seems to have adopted a stance of benign neglect toward them lately. So, for instance, you can search for games from any team and any year, and you've got a fair shot of finding at least one full game they played that year. Today, let's enjoy what happens if you search "1990 Cubs".

The game we'll review together is from May 23, 1990. Linked here is the detailed box score from that day on Baseball Reference. (Spoiler alert, obviously.) And here's the video itself:

For nostalgic types, this is the superior form of the upload, because it includes (many of) the commercials. If you miss not only baseball (the game you got to watch just a few weeks or months ago) but the world of the 20th century, watching these games can really make you feel immersed in it—and the videos that keep the commercials from the original broadcast maximize that feeling of time travel.

Not all of that is good, of course. Did you miss hearing Thom Brennaman call games? Probably not, but he takes the middle three innings of this one, alongside Steve Stone. Then again, if you're young enough not to remember (or perhaps even have heard of) the arrangement, this might give you a fun frisson of discovery: As late as the mid-1990s, Harry Caray would swap into the Cubs radio booth to do play-by-play for innings 4-6 each day. Stone would then broadcast with (most often) Brennaman, Josh Lewin, or Wayne Larrivee, until Caray returned for the final three frames. It wasn't a common setup even then, but it was certainly not unique, either. Nowadays, it would be a downright thorny legal issue.

Anyway, Brennaman is here. So are some of the things we did well to leave in the century to which they belonged, like a midgame sequence in which Arne Harris lingers long on a shot of an attractive woman in the stands. Unlike so many similar shots over the years, this one doesn't involve an especially revealing or suggestive outfit. Yet, after Stone finishes a salient point about Mike Scioscia's evolving approach at the plate, Caray says, "Sorry, Steve, I didn't hear anything you said," followed by an unsavory chortle. "With me, Harry, it's baseball, baseball, baseball," Steve replies, but it doesn't quite save this moment from cringe territory.

Harris, the famous producer of Cubs games on TV for so much of the formative period of the modern team, was infamous for these shots, but in this case, he also chose to work in artistic juxtaposition. After a brief cut back to game action, he delivered a shot of an adorable baby or toddler, as if to shame Caray for his ribaldry. Not only didn't it work, but Harry kept shooting: "Is that yours, Steve?" he teased, and Steve was forced to disclaim his paternity of a random child on national TV. It's undeniably funny, and a big part of why the Cubs' popularity soared during the superstation years. It's also a little unsettling, through modern eyes.

Let's take a moment to celebrate Harris, though, for the much less objectionable innovation that made him and his broadcasts famous. Do you remember watching Cubs games prior to about 20 years ago and thinking every play—even relatively routine ones—was a little more exciting than in other places? Do you ever think that players used to run harder through the bag on ground balls than they do now? As ludicrous as those subjective impressions sound (and are, objectively speaking), they weren't totally in your head. They were created for you, by Harris.

As nicely detailed by Zach Buchanan in this 2021 piece at The Athletic, TV producers of baseball games can make two different sets of choices when a ground ball is hit during a game. As a default setup, they pretty much all start with the center field camera, then flip to the view from high and behind home plate—a proxy for the vantage point of the broadcaster calling the play—when the ball is hit. The industry standard, going all the way back to the 1960s under NBC Sports producer Harry Coyle, was to stick to that second shot and follow the play to its conclusion, unless it were a ball in the gap or something, necessitating cuts to runners in various positions. On a grounder to second base, the camera follows the ball to the fielder, then patiently tracks along with the throw, over to first base.

Harris didn't do things that way. He was famous for the 4-2-3 cut (named for the standard numbers assigned to the various camera positions involved), which starts the same way the Coyle version does. Once a player like Ryne Sandberg or Shawon Dunston collected a bouncer, though, Harris would cut to the camera positioned high alongside first base. The resulting shot would have the fielder throwing the ball downscreen, and right around the time it got to the glove of (in this case) Mark Grace, a runner would zip by in a blur. 

This style creates, perhaps, some artificial suspense, and those of us who watched hundreds of games produced by Harris learned to intuit based on the runner, the pace of the ball, and the cleanness of the play by the infielder whether they would be safe or out. For casual and new fans, though, and perhaps especially for kids, it was easy to mistake the extra cut and the more visible speed of the runner—they're streaking straight across your screen, in the Harris formula, instead of running deeper into the picture and off toward a corner as they do when viewed from high behind home—for extra action and more drama. It worked on plenty of double play tries, too, transforming even the out on the lead runner into a tense, visually captivating thing. The shots now often seen in slow motion on replays used to be how Harris would frame the play in real time.

I began life as a baseball fan in 1997, so I only watched five seasons of Cubs baseball before Harris died at the end of the 2001 season. The broadcasts still tended to use his device until several years later, but now, they match the industry standard and stick to 4-2 on such plays. To some extent, Harris was also problem-solving, because in that much lower-definition era and without motion smoothing options like we have today, the extra cut kept him from having to show the throw across the diamond more or less as a confused blur, as some broadcasts did. These days, no one has to work around that hurdle, so the 4-2 makes the most sense. I still love the 4-2-3, though, even though I'm now aware of it and much less taken in by its attempt to create drama. I suspect the effective deployment of this subtly different capture of a play is part of why so many fans fell in love with a version of the game that was not actually materially more interesting or varied than the one played now—whatever old heads might tell you.

---

For today, we end this here. This is part one, and it didn't even talk about the game itself! But when watching these old games, the game itself is just part of the fun anyway. Tomorrow, we will tackle the action of the contest. Come back and check it out.

View full article