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of pitches he threw. Then, on the plane on Monday, as I flew off to wherever the Orioles were going to be playing, I’d watch a tape of the previous night’s game so I could critique myself. About a month into the season I started thinking to myself, “What am I doing? I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep broadcasting a game seven days a week and watching these other games that I’m taping.” I was starting to dream about baseball. It was like the only thing happening in my whole life, and I was like, “Man this is not good. This is a little bit out of control here. I need more balance in my life.” So I finally just decided that I was just going to have to give up on all my reviewing.

Timing is a major issue in baseball. In football, the timing is a given. They come up to the line, they snap the ball. The play-by-play guy does the play-by-play, then the guy gets tackled and then the analyst comes in and they start showing replays and dissect the play. It’s easy. Football is the easiest. I’m not downgrading anybody who does football, but I think it’s the perfect made-for-TV sport. In baseball, there’s a pitch thrown every ten to fifteen seconds, roughly; sometimes it’s a little bit longer if there are men on base. There’s a tendency for people to think that nothing’s going on in baseball until the ball gets hit. That’s a fallacy. That’s a real misunderstanding of what’s going on. You have the signal from the catcher to the pitcher; the signal from the shortstop to the second baseman about coverage; somebody might be signaling the center fielder if he can’t quite see the catcher’s signals; and don’t forget, every defensive player needs to know what every pitch is supposed to be. Every pitch in baseball is akin to the snap of the ball in football.

OREL HERSHISER:

ESPN helped me with my understanding of baseball. It brought scouting to another level. Before, when you only had a game of the week, you only saw one game on television. But as soon as ESPN started doing games in locations on multiple nights, we had more of a library of what players were doing around the country and in the game, and so we were able to start plotting and scouting and analyzing. I would grease-pencil the broadcast to see a hitter’s eyes move. I would look at defenses and slow-motion replays to see a guy hit that pitch, and then he pulled it to the shortstop, so we would change the positioning of the defenders. ESPN definitely helped us. The moment that more games were broadcast than just a game of the week, the game changed scouting-wise and ability-wise.

JEAN McCORMICK, Coordinating Producer:

In the spring of 1990, I was in my first months as the first female studio producer at ESPN. While people had for the most part been kind and supportive, I was constantly being tested on knowledge. One afternoon, something came up about various records for scoreless innings in pitching. I mentioned that Babe Ruth had pitched the most number of consecutive scoreless innings in the postseason (twenty-nine and two-thirds) for the Red Sox from 1916 to 1918; a record wasn’t broken until 1961 by Whitey Ford. This led to a conversation about the 1918 World Series, at that time the last year that the Red Sox had won the World Series over the equally cursed Cubs.

At some point someone asked me, again most likely a test, who the star pitcher was for the Cubs. When I said Hippo Vaughn, the group said almost in unison “Ah, Hippo Vaughn.” Everyone dug into his career and statistics as if he were going on the mound for the Cubs that night. Vaughn had pitched in the famed double “no-hitter” of 1917, where neither team had a hit in the first nine innings. The remarkable thing about this conversation was that it wasn’t remarkable for ESPN. Pitching stats from 1917 and 1981 were analyzed in as great detail as those from the previous night. When you participated in conversations of such high caliber, it was and still is often hard to discuss sports with “normies” who didn’t work at ESPN. I often wondered where people would have worked, myself included, if ESPN hadn’t been created.