Boog Sciambi and the 7,000-mile ESPN Baseball Challenge
Perhaps you are the proud owner of two bleary eyes after staying up to watch live baseball from Korea in the wee small hours this week.
Perhaps you’re not as ardent and you waited until a more reasonable hour to catch a replay of the first week of regular season ball from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
And then there’s Jon “Boog” Sciambi. He lives in New York and one of his gigs is calling play-by-play as part of ESPN’s baseball package. Since there is no Major League Baseball for ESPN to broadcast these days, he’ll be splitting time with Karl Ravech doing the play-by-play on the package of games coming out of the Korea Baseball Organization and being shown live in the U.S.
Sort of. Sciambi is not leaving his home in New York. In fact, ESPN techs have invaded his apartment to load the place cameras, lights, microphones and computers. He’s gotten a booster course in TV production, because come Friday at 5:30 a.m. his time (ET), Sciambi will be on the air, calling a game being played 7,000 miles from where he’ll be sitting.
It’s his opening day – the KIA Tigers are facing the Samsung Lions, and he’ll be calling every ball, strike, run and out.
Through it all, he won’t see another human being except through the glories of a computer screen. He’ll team with Eduardo Perez as the analyst for the opener, then with Jessica Mendoza as the analyst the next two games – the LG Twins against the NC Dinos.
Calling a game remotely calls for a whole new mindset. Typically, Sciambi would spend hours doing research on the teams he’ll be seeing and would spend several hours before the game at the ballpark talking to managers, coaches and players in an attempt to pick up nuggets that he’ll be able to deliver during the nine innings to come.
The research doesn’t change, but it’s tough to cash in on the individual relationships he has around baseball in an age of social distancing.
“All that’s going to be different,” Sciambi said. “And it’s going to be a challenge.”
More than that, once the game starts, there won’t be any people in the stands, thanks to the COVID-19 Coronavirus, and that makes Sciambi’s job exponentially more difficult. Sure, he’s going to work through the night to get ready, but that’s nothing.
“When we work in person, even though there’s nothing scripted, with body language and eye contact, everything flows,” Sciambi said. “Doing it this way, there are time delays that wouldn’t be part of a broadcast done in person in the ballpark. You have to adapt.
“It’s going to be a bit of a tap dance, calling the game off a monitor. It’s a test. It’s tough to get a read on home run calls. Any ball hit in the air or any fair/foul call can be challenging. And without a crowd you lose getting that sense of what you are seeing on the monitor. The timing may be a bit off, but we’ll find a way to make it work.”
ESPN’s deal with Korean baseball calls for games to be broadcast six days a week, the play-by-play work getting split with three each to be called by Ravech and Sciambi. All the camera work will be done by the regular Korea television crews, which means every once in a while, a hoped-for replay or a questionable call won’t be shown as expected.
But, it’s baseball. And that’s not nothing.
“It’s going to be different, but it’s going to be fun,” Sciambi said.
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
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