MLB should bench postseason broadcast gimmicks

If you’ve been watching MLB postseason games this year, you’ve no doubt noticed a specific camera angle called “Ump Cam” (or “Mask Cam” as Brian Anderson referred to it on Saturday).

As the name implies, it’s a camera placed on the mask of the home plate umpire that allows viewers to see the action from the unusual perspective of someone who’s behind both the batter and the catcher. In theory, this is a neat idea: it’s a camera shot we’re not accustomed to seeing that we now get to see repeatedly during these games. There’s just one problem with it.

It’s awful.

The most immediate flaw with Ump Cam is that as it turns out, home plate umpires move a lot more than you think they do; they’re constantly crouching and uncrouching and shifting where their eyes are going as a pitch comes in. And as a result, pretty much every usage of Ump Cam is shaky and disorienting. Whereas every other camera angle from these games is stationary and settled and comfortable, Ump Cam makes it nearly impossible to pay attention to any given pitch due to the screen wobbling from one direction to the next the entire time. Even worse is that because the umpire’s gaze is never exactly parallel with home plate, it becomes a chore to even figure out if any given pitch is a strike or not when it’s seen through their eyes.

Ump Cam, in other words, is a mostly useless camera angle that should only be used in the incredibly rare situations that specifically demand it, ala how the Pylon Cam is utilized during football games. It does make us more appreciative of how hard it is for umpires to see a pitch coming in, but seeing the action from the perspective of someone who has a less stable, less cinematic view than what we’d normally get from an outfield camera doesn’t exactly enhance our experience.

But here’s the primary issue with it: Ump Cam is not being used sparingly during these playoffs. Rather it’s being used constantly , again and again and again, and almost always in situations that don’t remotely require it. I went back and checked the four MLB playoff games from last Saturday to see how many times Ump Cam was featured during those broadcasts on FS1 and TBS. The total I added up to was 39 – including a montage from the Mets-Phillies game that featured six swings in a row from that camera angle. Combined, roughly three minutes of game time on Saturday was devoted solely to Ump Cam.

That is an insane amount of usage for a crappy, dizzying camera angle that no one has ever asked for and that you’d ordinarily never see once in a regular-season game. The Dodgers-Padres game alone from Saturday had 14 instances in which it was used.

In other words, it’s not just that this camera is being used, it’s that it’s being severely, irritatingly overused, regardless of whether it’s appropriate or not. The most egregious example of this is that there were six instances on Saturday in which Ump Cam was actually implemented live during pitches – something I can’t fathom baseball fans enjoyed considering that however fast and disorienting Ump Cam normally is during slow-motion replays, it’s even worse when it’s in live, regular speed. (Not to mention that when a ball is put in play during live Ump Cam, it’s almost impossible to tell what it even means given how terrible the depth perception is from that angle.)

So why is this gimmicky camera angle being used so much during the postseason?

It’s hard not to conclude that the answer is that these broadcasters are so insecure about baseball as a television product that they feel the need to dress it up since Ump Cam isn’t the only unnecessary gimmick that’s been foisted upon these games.

Live, in-game interviews are suddenly being used dramatically more in the postseason, even though it requires cutting away from the action to interview people – which, again, it’s hard to imagine fans liking all that much. FS1’s broadcasts feature enormous countdown graphics that indicate when stars like Shohei Ohtani and Bryce Harper will come to bat, an implementation that’s been widely mocked on social media.

FS1’s scoreboard, additionally, features tiny particles that are constantly moving throughout the game, and ESPN – whose wildcard broadcasts also featured shoehorned in-game interviews and bizarre Ump Cam cut-ins – touts a scoreboard with a win probability meter that is continually adjusting after every at-bat.

These baseball games feel like they’re being produced through flop sweat. You get the sense that the people directing them are terrified that their audience is going to abandon them at any given moment, that viewers don’t have the attention span for baseball anymore, and that we need to be bombarded with as many wacky graphics and unorthodox camera angles as possible or else we’re going to change the channel.

But the reality is that baseball is doing fine. Attendance numbers were up this year . ESPN’s ratings for their wildcard broadcasts were sky high, as have been TBS and FS1’s divisional broadcasts, and the “innovations” that have been injected into these games have been almost universally derided by viewers on social media, who have found the perpetual intrusions to be distracting more than anything.

The reality is that shoving Ump Cams, in-game interviews, and countdown-to-Ohtani graphics in people’s faces aren’t bringing in a single extra viewer or keeping a single person from wanting to watch more. People are watching these games because they like them! Viewers don’t need Ump Cam lobbed at them at every waking opportunity any more than they need to see Pylon Cam ten times a game during NFL broadcasts, and if anything, MLB might stand to gain more viewers if people felt they were watching a telecast that wasn’t acting like they need to compensate for the quality of the product being shown to them.

If a moment ever arises in which it would genuinely be beneficial to see a play from the umpire’s point of reference, then, by all means, use it. But just because these networks can use this camera angle repeatedly doesn’t mean they should, and certainly not for the sake of it being mandated a certain amount per game.

There’s a time and a place for things like Ump Cam and it’s way closer to being never than 39 times a day.

The author of this piece can be found on Bluesky and Twitter @velodus.

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