Baseball has tried a lot of things in recent years to spice up their television broadcasts and make them more engaging for fans watching at home. One of those developments is getting players in the field mic’d up while in the outfield waiting on the ball to possibly come their way. For exhibition games like Spring Training (or the All-Star Game) it’s turned into a pretty popular practice.
However, on Thursday, Red Sox outfielder Mookie Betts might have seen more action on the mic than any player that has come before. Watch as he seamlessly handles catches and cut-off throws while calling his own action on the play-by-play on the ESPN telecast. He even calmly plays a ball and then goes right back into a very thorough discussion about his golf game.
.@mookiebetts doing his own play-by-play … and seamlessly going back to talking about his short game 😂 pic.twitter.com/JmjnK2wAxz
— ESPN (@espn) March 7, 2019
Baseball should do more of this throughout the regular season as well. There’s surely enough downtime in a telecast where the booth can talk to players and engage with them. If managerial interviews can become commonplace during games, then why not this?
Of course, players might not be so eager to be multi-tasking on commentary and playing the field when the games actually count, but it might be worth a try.
[ESPN]
