Tuesday was the beginning of TV coverage. The New England series, which my crew had been working, was going to be covered by NESN through Friday. As it turned out, I was assigned the plate for the first game, which was to go off at 10:00.
TV games are rather different from normal Little League games. Although the play during the innings is normal, the between-innings periods are controlled by the TV folks, since they need to have time both to show their ads and also to have the announcers do their spiel. This is particularly the case before the two halves of the first inning, when they’re going through pre-recorded “Hi, I’m Johnny Smith” segments for all the players. As a result, they have a system – the 1st and 3rd base umpires are given buzzers kind of like what you get at a restaurant. They hold the players in the dugout until Doc buzzes them, at which point they go out and do their warm-ups. When TV is ready, Doc gives the plate man the high sign, and things get underway. It does mean a fair amount of standing around between innings, however – quite the opposite of the “hustle on, hustle off” we’re normally trying to do between innings. It was a good system, overall, once you got used to it. It was a little harder for me being the guinea pig – was at least able to pass some of the quirks along to subsequent umpires. The big thing is that the players have a very limited amount of time to get their warm-ups in, so if the teams dawdle out of the dugout, the pitchers might only get 1 or 2 pitches. This upset one of the pitchers the first time, but they got into the swing of things pretty quickly.
I had a body mike on during the game so that they could pick up my ball and strike calls (not that anybody’s ever accused me of being too quiet on the field). The fun part was putting it on – I wear one of those “magic belts” under my pants but on top of my shirt to help hold everything in place, so I practically had to drop my drawers (discretely in a corner behind the fence behind home plate) in order for them to thread the wire where it needed to go.
This game was Vermont-Rhode Island. In the bottom of the third, Rhode Island went up 6-1, but Vermont answered in the top of the fourth, putting up 5 runs there and 4 in the 5th. Rhode Island pulled to within 1 in the bottom of the 6th, but Vermont held on to win 10-9. Although you were always aware of the TV control between innings, during actual game play one could pretty well forget about it. I thought I had a reasonably solid game.
Because NESN was broadcasting, the two New England games were back-to-back, rather than being alternated with the Mid-Atlantic games. Thus we had the next game at 1:00 as well. Michael McDowell had the plate for this one, and I was out at second base. We gave Michael a little grief about making sure he didn’t take this game into extra innings the way he had his first game, but this didn’t turn out to be an issue – Massachusetts downed New Hampshire 9-5.
There was one really stellar play late in this game – a popup near the fence down the third base line, past the end of the media well. The Massachusetts third baseman at the time, who was a substitute not a starter, went tearing over, slid on one knee and caught the ball inches from both the ground and the fence. In doing so, his hat popped off, which he speared out of the air with his other hand, all on camera. The next day, ESPN was showing this as one of the “Top Ten Plays of the Day.”
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