Fox Will Mention ‘Dead Guys’

It’s probably a little too early to say that Fox Sports has ruined baseball’s Game of the Week since it hasn’t had one.

But that hasn’t stopped indignant baseball historians and protectors of public morals on both coasts from roasting Fox Sports president David Hill already.

See, Hill rocked their fragile world in the New York Times Magazine a week ago by saying he would sack any Fox announcer who “talks about dead guys during a broadcast.”

“I’m sick of dead guys,” Hill said.

Those dead guys would include Ty Cobb and Cy Young, Walter Johnson and Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente and Jackie Robinson, Lou Gehrig and even our beloved Babe Ruth.

In fact, aren’t most of baseball’s greatest players either dead or darned near dead? They must be, as upset as baseball’s pit bulls of protocol have become over Hill’s remark.

Hill admits he said what he said to the New York Times. He doesn’t take back one word of it, either, but he’d like to add a few. What he told the Times, he said, was what he told his announcers.

“In the middle of a game, in the heat of battle, I had to come up with a line that makes them realize when they wax lyrical about the past, it’s only in order to put the present into perspective,” Hill said.

“History in a game is only effective when it lends perspective. Fox announcers have to keep in the back of their minds that to our young viewers, dinosaurs roamed the earth when dad was a boy.”

And that doesn’t mean you can’t mention Lou Gehrig in the same breath with Cal Ripken or Cy Young in the same breath with Greg Maddux.

It means that if Fox and baseball want to attract young viewers, Tim McCarver can’t spend the middle innings of a dull game droning on about Steve Carlton’s tightly wound slider, even though Carlton isn’t exactly dead yet.

“What this sort of reminds me of is somebody walking into a locker room at the Super Bowl while the coach is in the middle of his inspirational speech … and they take it all literally,” Hill said.

Hill said he’s not only aware of history’s impact on the game, he’s eager to illustrate it.

Anybody old enough to remember Ruth and Cobb must remember the old movie newsreels. Well, Twentieth Century Fox owns one of the oldest of them, Movietone News. There are thousands of miles of film in cans stored at Fox Studios in Los Angeles. It dates to 1919, and a lot of it is baseball footage.

At this moment, those baseball snippets are being digitized, computerized and catalogued into 10-, 20- and 30-second bites to be used during games. When a Fox announcer, for example, sees Frank Thomas park No. 59 with three games left in the season, a technician in the truck will be able to punch a few buttons and show us Roger Maris’ 59th homer in 1961.

“If we weren’t worried about the tradition of the game, why would we spend so much time going back into the Fox Movietone News library to pull out vignettes going back to the 1920s? “There’s so much of it, not just the edited stuff, but a lot of raw film right out of the camera,” Hill said. “We probably won’t get it right until the end of this season or beginning of next.”

Fox isn’t doing this for the maudlin traditionalists who have done so well by baseball the past several years. Oh, no. They’re doing it for the kids, who don’t remember Ruth or Gehrig or …