
Live From MLB at Rickwood Field: FOX Sports' Negro Leagues Tribute Game Aims To Take Sound Way Back A1 Joe Carpenter studied Ken Burns' Baseball documentary for sonic cues By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Thursday, June 20, 2024 - 10:43 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
Major League Baseball's Negro Leagues tribute game tonight at Birmingham, AL's Rickwood Field, a regular-season game between the St. Louis Cardinals as the home team and the visiting San Francisco Giants, will feature period uniforms and other historical elements to honor the legacy of the Negro Leagues era. The audio, too, will offer a reminder of the past.
A record crowd at Rickwood Field for 1955 Southern Association All-Star Game
The stadium, which opened in 1910, was home to the Birmingham Black Barons from 1924 to 1960. The tribute game will honor late Hall of Famer Willie Mays, a Birmingham native who began his professional career with the Barons in 1948 (and who died this week), and also celebrate the Juneteenth holiday.
Vintage Audio FOX A1 Joe Carpenter, who is helming the audio for the game, notes that much of the production's sound is dictated by the stadium itself, an integral part of the tribute production. The base paths of the 10,800-seat stadium, the oldest professional ballpark in the U.S. and now a National Historic Site, are flanked by concrete and steel stands, unique at the time and acoustically reflective. A tile-roofed cupola on the roof behind home plate provided space for the announcer and the press and is still in place. Thus, a certain amount of midrange ring might be expected.
You have to just go with what you got, says Carpenter. Hopefully, it's going to be hot and humid. The wood will be creaking, and the place will sound all kind of echoey and ghostly and cool.
MORE FROM MLB AT RICKWOOD FIELD:
FOX Sports Pays Tribute to Black Baseball With Special Broadcast in Birmingham
FOX Sports' Francisco Contreras and Tom Lynch Dive Into the Operations Plan
MLB Renovation Highlights the Historic Venue's Heyday
MLB Network Eulogizes Willie Mays in Real Time During Tuesday's MiLB Broadcast
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum Connects Rich History to Tribute in Birmingham
Most of the microphones that Carpenter and submixer Joel Groeblinghoff will deploy are quite modern, although he's open to deploying some vintage gear in the production, if only for visual effect. He notes the classic Shure 55 Super Dynamic mic used by actor Kevin Costner to open the Field of Dreams game that FOX broadcast in 2021. That particular mic is no longer available, however: once Costner autographed it after that game, it became its own trophy.
We had a nice microphone from that era that suited the look we were trying to achieve, he says. It would certainly have looked out of place to have a microphone that didn't exist in that time period. We might be able to do the same thing here.
Putting in the History The broadcaster intends to give viewers some semblance of what it was like to watch a ballgame on TV 70 years ago. Although the World Series was first carried in 1947 on the experimental station W2XBS (predecessor of today's WNBC New York), the first radio broadcast of a Negro League game took place on Aug. 7, 1942; the first simultaneous radio and TV broadcasts of Negro League games were on June 6, 1948 - a doubleheader between the Cleveland Buckeyes and the Memphis Red Sox.
In Jim Crow America, the Negro Leagues built their own universe of fans and stars, a number of whom went on to play in the major leagues, including Mays, Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, Ernie Banks, and Elston Howard.
Negro Leagues' Birmingham Black Barons were at home in Rickwood Field.
However, Negro League broadcasts were few and regionally scattered, subject to an equally segregated media landscape for broadcast and print. A few stations aired the scores of Negro Leagues games, but many didn't bother even with that.
Baseball on television in general began to pick up steam just as the sport began integrating, in the early 1950s. The World Series and the All-Star Game were on TV, and NBC became baseball's first exclusive network-television broadcaster - all in 1950. West Coast viewers could finally watch major-league games live during the 1951 postseason, and everyone could do so in color the following year (if they had the right TV set, which almost no one did at the time).
The technology progressed along with the sport. In 1956, CBS Sports director Frank Chirkinian devised an earplug with interruptible feedback (or IFB) to connect the announcer, director, and producer and thus smooth on-air monitoring. What may have been the first instant replay using videotape occurred on July 17, 1959, during a Yankees-game broadcast by WPIX New York. It came after a walk-off hit by Chicago White Sox right fielder Jim McAnany ended a no-hitter by Yankees pitcher Ralph Terry. Because the game was being videotaped, announcer Mel Allen asked director Terry Murphy to play a tape of the hit over the air.
Carpenter says he spent a considerable amount of time researching the sound and feel of broadcasts from venues like Rickwood Field. That included hours of watching Ken Burns's 1994 PBS documentary Baseball and listening for key effects sounds, such as bat cracks.
You can tell some of the bat cracks are real but most of them are Foleyized, put in in postproduction, he explains. For the game, I'm going to take a combination of automation and live Foley for the effects sounds. I'll use the [Calrec] GPIs [general-purpose interfaces, which can be used to execute such tasks as fader moves and mutes triggered externally by, in this case, the video switcher] for the natural sounds of the game. But I'll live-Foley' sounds to match what's h
More from Sports Video Group
18/07/2025
Live from the 153rd Open Championship: SMT Enhances Video Board Experience; Enab...
18/07/2025
ShotTracker's Davyeon Ross on Revolutionizing Basketball On the Court and ...
18/07/2025
Home Pitch: How the Danish League Brought Its Live Match Production In-House Matchday Production produced 800+ matches across Denmark in its first year By Geor...
18/07/2025
Live From the 153rd Open Championship: EMG Debuts Spidercam for Golf, Expands Su...
18/07/2025
Usyk vs Dubois II: Bringing the fight to life with state of the art cameras and ...
18/07/2025
Usyk vs Dubois II: DAZN's head of boxing Chris Glanville talks helicopters, ...
18/07/2025
Live From the 153rd Open Championship: NBC Expands Unilateral Effort; Shared Stu...
18/07/2025
Warner Bros. Discovery's Anne Graham on Training New Professionals to Ensure...
18/07/2025
Live From the 153rd Open Championship: How R&A Spidercam Became a Reality for Go...
18/07/2025
ESPN Bulks Up Onsite Studios, Cameras, Player Mics for WNBA All-Star Weekend Besides the game, four studio shows will be produced onsite By Jason Dachman, Edit...
17/07/2025
SVG Sit-Down: OpenDrives' Sean Lee, Michael Wilsker, and Jason Matousek on E...
17/07/2025
Oracle's Geoff Tognetti on Staying Ahead of the AI Curve Through Further Ado...
17/07/2025
NBA's Summer League Is a Hot Bed of AI, Immersive Innovation Testing Audio mixing, intelligent camera framing are among AI-driven efforts By Ken Kerschbaum...
17/07/2025
SVG's TranSPORT Conference Returns to NYC on Oct. 21; Register Today! By SVG Staff
Thursday, July 17, 2025 - 8:29 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
St...
17/07/2025
Gravity Media chosen as group name for merged OB business By George Bevir
Wednesday, July 16, 2025 - 11:30
Print This Story
Gravity Media executive chairm...
17/07/2025
SES Closes Deal to Acquire Intelsat, Creating New Giant in Satellite Connectivit...
17/07/2025
How MLB Pulled Off That Unforgettable Hank Aaron Tribute at the All-Star Game Vintage content, state-of-the-art projection/processing combine in marvelous mile...
16/07/2025
Deltatre Acquires Endeavor Streaming in Major Streaming Industry Move The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2025 By Brandon Costa, Direc...
16/07/2025
SVG Regional Sports Production Summit 2025: All Sessions Now Available to Watch ...
15/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: FOX Sports Aims To Capture Chatty Players on the Fi...
15/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: From Live Event Coverage to Studio Shows, MLB Netwo...
15/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: FOX Sports' Francisco Contreras and Tom Lynch o...
15/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star: FOX Sports' Production Is Bigger Than Ever in Steamy...
15/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star: FOX Sports Director Matt Gangl and Producer Pete Machesk...
14/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: ESPN Preps for Home Run Derby Broadcast While Produ...
14/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: ESPN Operations on Supporting Monday's Home Run...
14/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: ESPN's Home Run Derby: Statcast Edition' T...
14/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: ESPN Producer Scott Matthews Goes Inside the Home R...
14/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: ESPN's Phil Orlins on Adding Live Drone AR Smar...
14/07/2025
Sony's New Coach's Headset Was Designed in Collaboration With the NFL Featuring a custom dynamic boom mic, the headset will debut in the fall By Dan Da...
14/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: MLB Network's Marc Caiafa and Tom Guidice on th...
13/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: MLB Network Marks Five Straight Years of Onsite MLB...
11/07/2025
Behind the Mic: Amazon Prime Preps for First Season of NBA Action; MSG Networks ...
11/07/2025
SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Suite Studios' Craig Hering on Adapting to Client...
11/07/2025
2025 SVG Content Management Forum Breaks Down AI's Impact, Continued Transit...
11/07/2025
A Journey HOME: University of Nebraska's HuskerVision Goes IP Leaders from the HuskerVision and Lawo share their IP learnings By SVG Staff
Friday, July 1...
11/07/2025
CMSI, Remote Picture Labs, Ace ESPN's Cloud-Based Editing Efforts for Wimble...
11/07/2025
Netflix Enters the Live-Boxing-Production Ring for Round 2 With Historic Taylor-...
10/07/2025
5G for all? What the DFL's use of Easy5G and RefCam could mean for events in...
10/07/2025
Save the Date: PGA TOUR Studios Welcomes SVG Remote Production Summit on Oct 14-...
10/07/2025
Cloud on the Road: How Remote-Production-Service Providers Are Adapting to a New...
10/07/2025
Seattle Kraken's Ryan Schaber on the NHL Team Taking Live Game Productions I...
10/07/2025
FOX Sports Reboots Small Control Room in Los Angeles as Hub for Vertical-First P...
10/07/2025
SVG Sit-Down: MSE's Zach Leonsis, ViewLift's Rick Allen Go Deep on Joint...
09/07/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment, ViewLift Unveil Broadcast/Streaming Joint Ven...
09/07/2025
SVG Europe Audio State of Wireless Mics Forum: If we lose the spectrum, it...
09/07/2025
Tech Focus: Athlete Audio - Venues Provide Sound Just for the Players From locker room to field of play, personalized systems help rev up the athletes By Dan D...
08/07/2025
Groundbreaking Gamecocks: Inside University of South Carolina's Four-Control...
08/07/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment's Samantha Brady on the Power of the RSN...
08/07/2025
Live From 2025 FIFA Club World Cup: FIFA, HBS Focus on Tournament Wrap, With an ...