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Baseball Guru
06-29-2001, 05:18 PM
TV / RADIO: ESPN baseball telecasts getting new dimension
Prentis Rogers - Staff
Friday, June 29, 2001


In football, ESPN struck gold when it introduced Sportvision's Emmy-winning graphic "1st & Ten," the electronic first-down line.

Now, ESPN has again joined forces with Sportvision to introduce "K Zone," a three-dimensional box of the strike zone that will make its official debut on the "Sunday Night Baseball'' telecast of the Mets and Braves.

Though conceived as a replay tool, ESPN believes it will enhance the coverage of baseball as "1st & Ten" did for football coverage.

However, ESPN senior vice president Jed Drake said Turner Field is not the ideal place to debut "K Zone," primarily because the network won't be able to use its new "Dead Center'' camera.

"The perfect location for 'Dead Center' at Turner Field would require a 35-foot scaffold in front of the scoreboard," Drake said. "Needless to say, we will not be using 'Dead Center' in Atlanta. But we will use 'K-Zone.' "

Drake and analyst Joe Morgan insisted the new technlogy won't be used to show up the umpires.

"We always second-guess the umpires, so we don't need something like this to do that," Morgan said. "But we're not going to sit here and say that should be a ball and a walk. This is about bringing the game to viewers in a way they have not seen before.''

Meanwhile, ESPN Deportes, the Spanish-language telecast of "Sunday Night Baseball'' has also progressed, rising in three months from 8 million to 11 million homes.

"We try to match what the domestic telecast does," said ESPN Deportes analyst Candy Maldonado, "and we're getting the audience because there are so many superstar Latinos from different countries and not everybody knows English.''



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