Crack Of The Bat, Overdubbed



The NY Times' Richard Sandomir on Fox's latest dubious innovation.

Throughout the baseball postseason, Fox has been adding sound effects to make otherwise silent replays pop with the audio of bats hitting balls. I've heard the sounds now and then over the past few weeks, but they finally resonated last night during Game 4 of the World Series.

You heard it on Derek Lowe's sacrifice bunt and again on David Ortiz's double and Bill Mueller's groundout. There was a bonus audiofest when, with Orlando Cabrera batting, there was the sound of him hitting the ball, then an overloud effect of the ball hitting home plate. There was another bat-to-ball effect off Trot Nixon's double, which drove in two runs.

To the ear, the sound effects appear artificial because they are so disembodied. All other natural sound has been stripped out. The crowd has been muted.

Accepting that the sounds are real ones recirculated into the replays raises the practice above what CBS Sports did in 2000 when it added recorded bird chirps to a telecast of the P.G.A. Championship in Louisville, Ky., but the sounds were of birds not normally found in the city.

Real or not, Fox's replay sweetening is unnecessary, like lip synching. Fox's live audio - from the ball popping in the catcher's mitt to runners sliding into bases - is so good that it need not showboat by performing a live-to-replay audio transplant. Is Fox expecting more young men to pledge their allegiance to the network for its video game sensibilities? Fortunately, Fox's audio technician timed the insertion of the sounds well enough not to be embarrassed. Had a booming home run crack been added to a swinging strike replay, it would rival Ashlee Simpson's "Saturday Night Live" lip-synching fiasco.

In the spirit of Fox's occasionally outrageous creativity, why not add a Homer Simpson "D'oh!" to replays of a batter's swinging third strike?

Posted: Thu - October 28, 2004 at 02:40 PM      

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