By
Dan Connolly
Despite what most other baseball organizations are doing this season, the
Baltimore Orioles and their regional sports network, MASN, are grounding their broadcast crews during away games to start the 2022 season, according to a memo circulated by a MASN official.
That means Orioles TV and radio away broadcasts once again will be called remotely from Camden Yards, while Washington Nationals TV road broadcasts again will be called from Nationals Park. The Nationals’ radio announcers, who are employed by the Nationals organization and not MASN, will travel to road games this year, a spokesperson confirmed.
Of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams, the Orioles are currently the only organization that will have both TV and radio crews staying home for road games to begin 2022.
Yep, MASN once again is an industry trailblazer. Except all trails lead to the home ballpark.
According to a graphic circulating throughout the industry and verified by several sources, the only other TV broadcast team that may not travel is the
Los Angeles Angels; that has not yet been determined and is dependent upon the scheduling of specific broadcasters’ needs, though they may travel part-time, sources said.
On the radio side, the Orioles are one of only four broadcast teams not traveling to start the year, joining the Angels, the
Los Angeles Dodgers and the
Toronto Blue Jays. The Dodgers and Angels are not traveling due to broadcaster preference, sources said. Only the Orioles and Blue Jays have made the unilateral decision not to travel.
So, why?
Why are the Orioles doing this for the third time in three years, and with COVID-19 protocols relaxed throughout the country, including in the City of Baltimore?
According to a MASN memo written by the company’s HR Generalist Emily Dow, distributed to employees Friday and obtained by
The Athletic, this grounding is for the same reason as the previous two seasons: safety.
“In an abundance of caution due to the ongoing COVID pandemic, which will hopefully be winding down and soon be behind us, and as a prudent step in the context of a changing RSN (regional sports network) industry, MASN will begin the season operating under a hybrid model that enables MASN to conduct a production locally while leaving all the major production pieces in place in the truck on site,” Dow wrote. “In this model, MASN will be able to retain on-site production resources for road games in the home team city.”
The memo doesn’t specify a timeline to return to broadcast travel, simply stating that “there will be no travel for these individuals at this time.”
An Orioles spokesperson wouldn’t specifically discuss the broadcasting decision but doubled down on the idea that it’s being made in compliance with the organization’s stringent and successful COVID-19 protocols. The spokesperson stressed there are still active cases of COVID-19 diagnosed in the United States and that the Orioles — and consequently, MASN — have demonstrated an outstanding effort in keeping their employees healthy during the pandemic.
I’ll agree there. The Orioles and their medical staff should be commended for how well they have handled protocols during the pandemic. Incidents of breakouts in the last two years have been at a minimum. Additionally, if a broadcaster, or a team of broadcasters, has to be quarantined for COVID-19 reasons, that would cause problems in the booth and for team travel. I understand that.
But not for a moment do I believe this is primarily a safety issue.
This is about money. It usually is for this organization, especially when it comes to MASN.
MASN will save millions if they continue with this plan all season, primarily because they won’t be paying the travel expenses for the two TV on-air talents, four or so TV production staff members, two radio on-air talents and a radio engineer.
Instead, the TV producers and directors will be running things through newly constructed offices at both Camden Yards and Nationals Park while communicating with an independent TV truck and camera crews at each of the visiting cities.
Truthfully, with current technology, most teams are weaning their production crews off road travel, because many of the same duties can be done off-site. And TV truck personnel and camera operators have been contracted in visiting cities for years.
But as for the broadcasting talent?
The product suffers dramatically when they aren’t at the venue for live games.
For one, they are at the mercy of the camera shots. If a play isn’t clear on a monitor, it’s not clear to the broadcaster.
That became all too clear the last two seasons.
Veteran broadcaster Scott Garceau was highly criticized by fans for his TV calls the last two years. One of the most common complaints is that he had trouble comprehending the distance of fly balls. Were they potential homers or routine cans of corn?
You could make that complaint if Garceau were in the stadium when those balls were hit, but it is a whole different ballgame, pun intended, in remote-baseball announcing. Tell me you haven’t watched a swing on TV and thought that ball was gone only to see it drop lazily into an outfielder’s glove. We all have. The only difference is we’re only proclaiming the dinger to our couch-mates. Garceau is doing it to an unforgiving TV audience.
Or how about when radio play-by-play announcer Melanie Newman made a laconic call last April against the New York Yankees on a game-ending throw by
Anthony Santander. She was immediately roasted by fans, some of whom were particularly unpleasant in addressing her on social media. The truth is the video feed went out on Newman in the ninth. And when it came back she saw chaos at home plate. She was afraid to make the wrong call. So, she hesitated until she knew she was right and then proclaimed an Orioles victory with little emotion.
Obviously, it’s much harder to call action when you’re not there. But the impact of this decision goes beyond that.
Good broadcasters do their homework. And a large part of that is talking to the team’s players, manager, coaches and staff. They build relationships. They learn things. And then they pass on those nuggets to the audience. Now, half of their ability to research properly during a season will be taken away. As will a portion of their credibility. The product suffers. And, consequently, so do the viewers.
Then there’s the future aspect of this. Think MASN will be able to bring quality broadcast talent to Baltimore in the future if they aren’t traveling and everybody else is? Think they’ll be able to keep the talent they have under these circumstances?
MASN already has the reputation of not paying much for its broadcast talent. Add in the lack of travel, and good luck grabbing a name like Gary Thorne in future years.
You remember Thorne, the outstanding veteran broadcaster who was supposed to be part of the MASN team again in 2020? He didn’t announce games that year because the Orioles were using a limited crew and some Zoom participation in the 60-game season, particularly to keep their older broadcasters, such as the now-73-year-old Thorne, safe. That’s what they suggested, anyway.
But then we learned that wasn’t the cause of Thorne’s absence. We later discovered Thorne and MASN were in a months-long contract dispute. That was eventually settled, and Thorne was paid for 2020, but MASN
never used him for a game. So, they were paying one of the best broadcasters in the country and not using him.
His contract wasn’t renewed, obviously, and neither were those of other popular MASN on-air talents from the past few years, such as Rick Dempsey, Tom Davis, Jim Hunter, Dan Kolko, Bo Porter and Alex Chappell, among others.
MASN also fired its executive vice president Chris Glass last March, and has yet to confirm the dismissal or the reasoning. That was during the time when the network initially chose not to broadcast preseason games heading into Grapefruit League action, leaving staff and viewers hanging before reversing course.
This spring, MASN is televising three exhibition games, all remotely, while the Orioles Radio Network will broadcast eight from sites in Florida.
MASNsports.com’s reporters Roch Kubatko and Mark Zuckerman initially weren’t supposed to go to spring training this year, but that edict was reversed as games were about to start.
Additionally, the long-anticipated MASN app, which was launched well behind the apps of most broadcasting networks, finally came out last year. But it remains dependent upon a subscription to a participating cable provider, meaning fans can’t cut the cable cord if they want to stream O’s or Nats games through MASN.
And none of this even scratches the sticky iceberg of the ongoing lawsuit between the Nationals and MASN over TV rights fees.
That’s a real mess. Which this network pretty much has been since its inception.
Remember in the early 2000s when organizational officials said the money created by the regional sports network would allow the Orioles to compete every year with the big-spenders such as the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees? I was there for that comment. I heard it with my ears. But I never saw it happen.
To their credit, the Orioles are putting legitimate resources into their infrastructure under GM Mike Elias. But MASN, under Orioles CEO John Angelos, often looks like it is being produced in my parents’ basement. The network’s outdated graphics are a step north of Tecmo Bowl and the network is nearly void of independent programming besides big-league baseball.
Perhaps in a step forward, the network has “invested in building a new control room” at both Nats Park and Camden Yards. MASN also re-upped two of its more prominent broadcasters, Kevin Brown and Newman, to multi-year deals this offseason. And maybe those are signs that MASN is putting more focus on its product.
But it sure seems like those moves are more about spending a little here to save more there. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe MASN will lift its broadcast travel ban soon.
Or maybe MASN simply needs to alter its slogan from “Be There,” to “Be There; We Won’t Be.”
