Fox Baseball Coverage Wasn’t Dead On Arrival

It looked just like baseball, right down to the dead guys.

Major league baseball made its debut on Fox Saturday, and Fox Sports president David Hill wasted no time poking a little fun at himself.

The first images seen on Fox’s half-hour pregame show were those of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, culled from old Fox Movietone newsreel film. In case you’re a hockey fan, Ruth and Gehrig are both dead.

“I thought everyone might notice that,” Hill said from the studio in Los Angeles. “Those folks are no longer with us.”

On May 5, Hill was quoted as saying he would fire any announcer who talked about dead guys on a broadcast, sending baseball purists on a major league witch hunt. Hill later explained, however, that he was exaggerating to emphasize that he wanted the spotlight on “now,” not “way back when.”

The first actual mention of a dead person during a game came at about 10:25 a.m. PDT, when play-by-play announcer Thom Brennaman, doing the Atlanta-Cincinnati game, invoked the name of Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson.

Brennaman still works for Fox.

Fox showed four games Saturday - Atlanta-Cincinnati and Cleveland-Milwaukee at 10 a.m. and Los Angeles-New York and Boston-Seattle at 1 p.m.

Under terms of its contract with major league baseball, Fox has exclusive broadcast rights on Saturday afternoons, when no other games can be shown on local cable or over-the-air stations. It was the condition Fox demanded to revitalize the Saturday “Game of the Week” format, last used by NBC in 1989.

The hit of the day might have been Fox’s half-hour kids pregame show, “In The Zone,” a hip, fast-paced collage of features, technical tidbits and highjinx, hosted by a quartet of teenagers. It included a feature on Ken Griffey Jr., and 20-year-old Mariners rookie Alex Rodriguez heard some tips from Jay Buhner on how to organize his locker.

“In The Zone” was followed by a more conventional, half-hour pregame show with Chip Caray as host and Dave Winfield and Steve Lyons as analysts. They’re no threat to Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long, Fox’s NFL pregame guys.

“The next three or four weeks we’ll look at it, and we’ll be so much stronger. Right now, we’re just doing laps,” Hill said.

In the pregame show that preceded the 1 p.m. games, Fox took a look at a violent collision between the Indians’ Albert Belle and Milwaukee’s Fernando Vina at second base the previous night. That was a little disappointing.

Torborg, Winfield and even the iconoclastic Lyons, nicknamed “Psycho” during his playing days, all agreed there was no call to eject Belle for the collision, originally thought to have broken Vina’s nose.

Right or wrong, show business would have been better served by a little disagreement.

Lyons, a wacky journeyman catcher-infielder who once dropped his drawers on the field, is Fox’s best bet to emerge as a studio star, although Caray looks like good host material. Winfield needs work. He’s too wooden.

Fox also had microphones on managers Lou Piniella of Seattle, Phil Garner of Milwaukee and Ray Knight of Cincinnati. Tom Lasorda had agreed to be miked, but the Dodgers wouldn’t allow it, Fox said.

At one point, Knight was heard to say: “Dad gum it.”

Otherwise, it looked and sounded pretty much like baseball.