In the summer of 2024, I served as the broadcast director for the Tri-City Chili Peppers - a summer league, collegiate baseball team based out of Colonial Heights, VA playing in the Coastal Plain League. After originally being hired as a camera operator, I was quickly promoted to the broadcaster director position where I set three main goals for the broadcasts.
1. Make each broadcast better than the last
2. Make the viewer feel as if they are watching a professional broadcast
3. Make the viewer feel as if there are more cameras than there really are
Below are some examples of my work as well as some viewership statistics from the 2024 Tri-City Chili Peppers season broadcasts.
in 2024, the Tri-City Chili Peppers became the first team to ever play baseball under UV lights. Coined "Cosmic Baseball" the clip here shows myself and the broadcast on a clip that trended on Twitter that night. Many accounts posted it but the most popular on Twitter was Barstool Sports where it received 1.3 million views. The following morning, Sportscenter edited my broadcast into a feature piece.
The Sportscenter clip is a great example of my use of a mobile, crowd/on-field camera that I used to capture fans having fun at the stadium close up and getting a shot on the field of players touching home after scoring a run.
In this game, the Chili Peppers faced the Greenville Yard Gnomes. This clip is the start of the broadcast and the full first half inning of the game. I'm including a full half-inning here because it shows a lot of things I worked on throughout the season. To start, you'll see many of the GFX I created including a locator, starting pitcher GFX, defense GFX, lineup card GFX, & batter lower thirds.
For my GFX, I used a combination of Uno & Singular.live and output them into OBS Studio to broadcast.
Additionally, you can hear the directional condenser microphone I set up to capture sounds at home plate and ambient stadium audio to further immerse the viewer (goal #2) as well as the many cuts I make throughout the half inning in order to make it seem like I have more than three cameras on the field (Goal #3).
One of the things I am most proud of when I think back to my time with the Chili Peppers was bringing instant replay to the broadcasts. I was very limited when it came to equipment and after trying many different ideas I was unable to institute an ISO replay system but made do with the equipment I had to produce replays like the three shown here.
These examples were three homeruns all hit in a single inning but I used replays on good defensive plays, anything confusing that happened during the game to clarify for the viewers, close plays, and any other time that felt like a good opportinity.
In an effort to do everything possible to achieve goal #2, I wrote six reads for the Chili Pepper broadcasters, Charlie Ben-Ami & Connor Schuh. The two featured in this video are for online ticket sales & Cosmic Baseball schedule but I also wrote reads for the Chili Pepper's social media, YouTube channel, online merchandise store, and upcoming Coastal Plain League schedule.
Each of these reads had their own GFX which matched the theme of the others. The Cosmic GFX being the only exception as all of my GFX during cosmic games or about Cosmic games was lime green, hot pink, and bright orange to match the color scheme.
Roughly halfway through the season, I thought it would be a good idea to start doing a play of the game after the final out was made. I pitched the idea to the broadcasters, Charlie & Connor, and asked them what we should call it. Charlie came up with the "Spicy Play of the Game" and we ran with it.
I pitched to the team owner that we should get it sponsored and name it after a sponsor so we could make money off of the play of the game but, unfortunately, nothing ever came of it.
Here is a Spicy Play of the Game in the form of an Eli Weisner Walk-Off home run. Some context to this one: this was game one of a doubleheader that was being played as two 7 inning games, that's why you're seeing a walk-off in the bottom of the 7th. Secondly, I was forced to place my pitch camera at high home for this game, not something I wanted to do but we were having on and off rain all afternoon and could not find a safe solution to setting up the pitch camera in center field.
In the last couple weeks of the season, I was browsing John DeMarsico's Twitter, the broadcast director for SNY, the channel the New York Mets play on, and saw this Split Screen shot and became obsessed with it. Then a couple days later I saw a similar shot used in the MLB homerun derby and decided to make my own version. Here, I used it to show both pitchers, one coming on and one coming off, during a pitching change.
I also used it to show runners advancing while simultaneously showing an outfielder chasing down a ball in the gap, I used it like DeMarsico did to show the pitcher and batter simultaneously in a tense situation like 3-2 count with the bases loaded and two out, and a few other times for dramatic effect.
In normal Coastal Plain League games, the Chili Peppers stream on Flo Sports, an online streaming service for smaller sports across the world. In the 28 games I directed on Flo Sports, we totaled 3,243 with the most viewed game on July 18th having 239 viewers.
Our Cosmic Baseball games were exhibition games and since they were not Coastal Plain league sanctioned games, we streamed them on YouTube in order to reach a wider audience and hopefully gain new fans since Flo Sports requires a $30/month subscription to access.
Our First Cosmic game did amazingly well totalling 20,696 Live viewers. Following this game, viewership dropped dramatically which I believe is due to fewer popular social media accounts and news outlets posting about it.
Directing baseball is unlike directing any other sport. So many things can happen in so many different places, even all at the same time. You need eyes everywhere. Even with only two manned cameras, I believe I accomplished my goal of making it feel like we had more cameras than we did.
In the words of my good friend Charlie O'Dowd, "A project is never done, you just run out of time to keep working on it" and this rings true with the Chili Peppers broadcast. Sticking with goal #1 pushed me and my team to create some great baseball broadcasts and I look forward to the next time I get to sit down in the director's chair.
Photos courtesy of Courtney Vogel - Longwood University Marketing