Blue Jays takeaways: Hey, MLB Network, you do realize there’s a game going on

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This article was published 30/06/2021 (1602 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The view from Deep Left Field on the YouTube broadcast of the Blue Jays’ 9-7 extra-inning loss to the Mariners on Wednesday:

It was like watching a game on TV at bar with the sound down and a full table behind you chatting about it.

The first YouTube broadcast of the season gave Jays fans a very different viewing experience than they’re used to, with the MLB Network crew of Brian Kenny, former Blue Jay Mark DeRosa, Ryan Rowland-Smith and Sarah Langs sitting on a couch in a studio in New York and pretty much just having a four-hour conversation with a baseball game on in the background.

That’s not a criticism of the quartet. They, along with sideline reporter J.P. Morosi, who was at the park in Buffalo, were clearly doing the kind of show that MLB wants on these YouTube Games of the Week, and there were a lot of good things about it.

I enjoyed the emphasis on advanced stats. Rather than talking about how many runs a player had driven in, a lot of which has to do with how many people are on base when he comes to bat, we were shown things like OPS+ and ERA+, which measure how hitters and pitchers are performing relative to the rest of the league. There was even a mention of xWOBA, a metric that has never before been mentioned on a Blue Jays broadcast (it means expected weighted on-base average and it’s formulated to measure a player’s overall offensive production per plate appearance).

Another entertaining aspect of the webcast was the use of audio from Teoscar Hernandez and Ty France, the Mariners first baseman. France was especially fun as he kibitzed with a couple of Blue Jays baserunners.

France marvelled at Bo Bichette’s huge swing and dared Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. to steal second after his third-inning walk. Vladdy’s answer? “Hell no.”

When Bichette and Guerrero scored on Randal Grichuk’s double, we got to hear a few excited “Attaboy!”s from Hernandez, watching from the Blue Jays dugout.

Those were the fun parts of what was more a talk show around a baseball game than an actual baseball broadcast.

The less fun aspect was that, for the broadcast of a major-league baseball game, the game was hardly front and centre.

A lot of times in a televised game, the announcers will let the pictures do the talking while they tell stories or sometimes head off on tangents, but at least the viewer gets the sense that their attention is on the game. That didn’t always feel like that was the case Wednesday night.

There was very little discussion about key factors in the outcome of the game, such as how the Jays put 14 runners on base over the first five innings but were still trailing going into the sixth. Barely mentioned was Anthony Kay’s four innings of one-hit shutout relief that gave the Jays a chance to come back and force extra innings.

Nobody on the crew noticed that Bichette had been on the move from first base when Hernandez lined out to end the first, which is why the inning-ending double play by the Mariners was turned so easily.

One wondered how often the crew was lost in their own conversation and not even paying attention to the game. Langs was the only one who consistently was aware enough of the play going on to pause when a ball was put in play.

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But this is what MLB wanted, a departure from the routine baseball broadcast.

Not to sound like an old man yelling at clouds, but in my two decades in a major-league broadcast booth, while I always thought that listeners should feel like they were tuned in to a three-hour conversation between a couple of people watching a ball game, the YouTube broadcast took that idea way too far.

One could listen for an entire half-inning and have next to no idea what happened in the game, never mind the score.

In what’s clearly an attempt to expand the game to appeal to a new generation of fans, they too often forgot about the actual game.

Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star and host of the baseball podcast “Deep Left Field.” Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness