Fox Gives Baseball New Spin Network’s New Commercials Will Show Lighter Side Of Sport

Coming soon to your TV set: Lenny Dykstra singing punk rock. Matt Williams skulking around in a wig. Bobby Bonilla chasing after reporters rather than running away from them.

Fox Sports, which begins its baseball broadcasts June 1, unveils an unprecedented promotional effort in the next few weeks, trying to get baseball back in the good graces of its fans.

“We’re not just launching for the network, we’re relaunching for baseball,” said George Greenberg, the senior vice president and creative director of Fox Sports.

More than three dozen major leaguers taped commercials in spring training, with Fox going for the goofiest spots it could come up with. Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda is caught screaming into the camera, covered with an umpire’s mask, ranting louder than Dick Vitale.

“How can you call him out on that pitch! You know that ball was outside! WHAT were you looking at! LOOK at the play! You missed the play! You’re BRUTAL!”

“He was getting off the bus in Vero Beach. It was our last day of shooting,” said Scott Burns of Tool of North America, who wrote and directed the spots along with Eric Joyner. “I said to our producer we should see if we can get Lasorda to do something. Lasorda said, ‘I’m going to do this once. I’ve done stuff with film crews before and it takes forever, and I’m not doing that.”’

It wasn’t, however, the regular Lasorda diatribe.

“It’s what you can run,” Joyner recalled the manager saying, joking at his own foul language.

In another spot, Tino Martinez of the New York Yankees is on a therapist’s couch.

“In Seattle, I was always the other Martinez,” he says. “Even though I hit 31 home runs, it was always Edgar this and Edgar that. But with the Yankees, I won’t have to live in somebody else’s shadow. I’ll be free from comparisons. I can be my own Martinez.”

The camera focuses on pictures of Don Mattingly and Lou Gehrig that are framed in the office.

“Who’s this guy kidding?” the psychiatrist writes in his notes.

Seattle’s Randy Johnson poses as a newspaper delivery man, firing papers through windows as pedestrians duck for cover. Roger Clemens throws at a catcher target in the middle of a pistol range.

Bonilla, dogged by the New York tabloids during mush of his time with the Mets, chases down a reporter in the office of the Sun-Sentinal in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

“It seems there were some dangling participles in your last column,” he said. “Hey, any comment?”

As the reporter walks away, refusing to speak, Bonilla follows him down a hallway.

“Some of your readers find you’re not hustling after stories the way you did at the beginning of your career.”

The reporter ducks into a men’s room and goes into a stall. Bonilla holds a microphone to the door.

“Even fellow reporters have begun to question whether or not you can still swing the big pencil. How do you respond?”

“A lot of them just sprung from things about the players we read,” Burns said. “You’d get a little bit of knowledge and see where that would go.”

Vaughn, one of baseball’s most humble players, is pictured demanding king-like trappings. Detroit’s Cecil Fielder, known almost as much for his bulk as his bat, is accosted in a diner by a lunatic.

“Aren’t you the torturer of the sacred cow skin?” says the fan, his eyes bulging. “You have sent the skin of our bovine god into the heavens over 249 times. Does your soul have no remorse?”

Fielder quickly calls for the waitress.

“Miss, could you change that salad to a T-bone?”

Fox, which televises the World Series this fall, has used “Same Game. New Attitude” as its tag line for all of its sports endeavors. Baseball is no different.

“We need to promote baseball in a way its never been promoted before,” Greenberg said. “We need a really fresh spin on it.”

In one spot, Tim Salmon of the California Angels is spitting sunflower seeds as he’s dreaming. Suddenly, he’s surrounded by head-high sunflowers.

Teammate J.T. Snow pushes his way through the sunflowers.

“You got to remember: Eat the seed, spit out the shell,” Snow tells him. “Jeez.”