Watchdog

Televising baseball games is the core mission for both YES and SNY, but they come at the task from different angles.

YES’s philosophy primarily is to stick to the action and avoid having its game announcers and reporter Kim Jones go off on tangents, and it eschews such extras as in-game interviews and features.

SNY, in contrast, sends reporter Kevin Burkhardt on missions as varied as taking a kayak into McCovey Cove to interviewing a starting pitcher after he has been removed but before the game is over.

While visiting Shea Stadium last week to interview Keith Hernandez about his irreverent, quirky approach to analysis, I asked SNY’s lead game producer, Greg Picker, to explain the network’s philosophy. He credited the Mets as an organization for giving him the freedom to take chances and offered this five-minute answer to my question about SNY’s approach:

There is a contrast. The Yankees have a very special tradition. They have a place in history that’s very, very rare. They’re probably the most storied franchise in the history of sports. Every group has to do what they think is right for them.

I subscribe to the theory that we have a very good core group of people that have played baseball for years, covered baseball for years and know baseball inside and out. There’s not a lot that happens on the field that’s going to get by us as a group. And that being said I feel that so often in television we tend to complicate things and sure, you’re doing live TV and there’s pressure and it’s not easy, but our job quite simply comes down to entertaining the viewer. Whatever we have to do to get viewers to watch, to get viewers to understand.

Obviously most people who are watching are Mets fans, but we want to create a rooting interest. And not just in the Mets but in individuals. We want to be able to document Carlos Delgado or Carlos Beltran and the charities they’re involved in and that Reyes’ father was a grocery store owner when he grew up and he didn’t grow up with much. I want to get people to be able to understand that there’s more to these guys than what you see when they’re hitting or in the field.

Quite simply I subscribe to the notion that we’re going to take chances and they’re educated chances and it’s not always going to work and when it doesn’t work, OK. It’s not life and death. It’s a baseball game. It’s TV. If it doesn’t work we’ll acknowledge it didn’t work. Or maybe it worked for half the people and not the other half. I have a pretty good intuition of what I think is going to work. But we’ll take chances, and between [SNY executive] Curt [Gowdy Jr.] and me and [director] Bill Webb and the guys in the booth and our support staff, I want ideas. I want to try things. I want to put Ronnie [Darling] behind home plate during a game and get that perspective. We have other ideas we want to try that are pretty out there, but I want to do that. Like I said, it’s really educating and entertaining the viewer. If we can teach them about baseball and hold their interest and entertain them let’s do it. It means all different things.

My take on Kevin is that he has been an incredible asset to our broadcast. I’m not shy. I told him from the beginning I couldn’t care less if you’re on one time a game or five times a game. It’s no different from graphics or replays. It’s not about the quantity it’s about the quality. He has done an amazing job of being able to get nuggets of information or whatever he’s doing. He’s done a great job of enhancing what the guys are doing.

And if I’m sitting at home I hear our guys, who are terrific, three hours every night, and you know what, it’s nice to have a break, a fresh voice and a different perspective, someone who can tag or enhance what the guys in the booth have said or come up with something that will promote conversation up in the booth with what is going on on the field. Putting him in the kayak was Kevin’s idea. Last year we had Chris Cotter running in the sausage race in Milwaukee.

Especially when we go to visiting ballparks he is a great aid for us because sense of place is very important to us. We may have 90 percent of our Mets fans who’ve never been to Dodger Stadium. It’s up to us to do more than just show the game and as much as we can to give them a sense of place. If they can’t be there let’s give them the next best thing of what it’s like to experience a game at Dodger Stadium.

Different places it means different things. What’s the crowd like? Do they arrive late? Are they boisterous? How’s the food? What are they known for? In San Diego, there’s the warehouse. Do something on the history of that warehouse and how the ballpark was built around it. Not just show it but actually document it and give people a sense of what it’s like to be in the atmosphere in that particular place.