Baseball On Facebook Watch Is A Work In Progress, But It’s Off To A Good Start

With everything that’s going on with Facebook these days, a big piece of news in the House Of Zuck went by without much notice: Facebook Watch has started running exclusive broadcasts of Major League Baseball games.

Yes, that’s right folks: Every Wednesday afternoon from now until the end of the regular season, one MLB game will be shown on Facebook Watch and nowhere else. Not on your local regional sports network, not on MLB Network, and not on the MLB.TV package. The only way you’ll be able to see these games is to fire up Facebook on your laptop or mobile device, or use any streaming device/smart TV that can run Facebook video.

But what are you going to see when you do that? The idea of watching a game only online seems like something that reeks of trying to reinvent the wheel, where you can switch camera angles at will or look into a team’s bullpen, or watch replays on demand.

What I found out after watching pieces of the first game, the April 4 match-up of the Mets and Phillies, and the entire April 11 game between the Brewers and Cardinals is that, aside from some very Facebook-centric additions, watching the game on FB Watch isn’t much different than watching it on TV. And when you watch it on the big screen, like I did, it looks absolutely the same.

Even so, there are things that will need to be tweaked going forward:

The Good

Production values: The games are produced by MLB Network, which means that the broadcast looks like the ones they air on their linear network: a crisp, HD picture, multiple camera angles, great replays, good graphics, expert directing. If there were any missteps in the camerawork or direction, there didn’t seem to be any more than you’d see in any average broadcast.

Tweaks and changes: It feels like the production team is taking feedback from the comments that stream during the game to heart. The first week, the game started with the screen looking like this:

This made absolutely no sense. Many people were watching the action on a tiny phone screen. Why make the picture even smaller with a huge border? After a raft of complaints, the graphic package changed:

We understood why the score bug had to be so large; it needed to be seen on small screens. But it still looked intrusive. And on TVs, most of which use overscan, pertinent information got cut off.

In week 2, the graphics improved:

It was good to see that the production team took feedback seriously and make a picture that made more visual sense (though, we do have a beef that we’ll talk about in a second).

A lack of gadgetry: Both games were refreshingly free of the whiz-bang gadgetry and statistics that have infiltrated MLB broadcasts, especially on the national outlets. There was no “strike zone box” hovering over the plate to distract us from watching the pitch and how the hitter, catcher and umpire react. There was no constant display of the pitch speed. And, while we enjoy some of the advanced stats produced by Statcast, we were happy to watch a game that for once didn’t talk about exit velocity, spin rate, or any of the stuff that no one cared about as recently as five years ago.

No commercials: Since there were no commercials, we got two minutes of extra commentary and features between each half inning, with a countdown clock to help us figure out how long the break was. But that led to a problem, which we’ll explain below.

The Meh

Play-by-Play: Scott Braun from MLB Network did the play-by-play for both games. He did a solid job, and it’s always a plus when a guy from Central New Jersey hits the big time (at least for me). But he also fell into the same trap that all young play-by-play guys fall into: he tried to be too clever at times and didn’t let the game breathe. He said a ball was “well struck” more than once, called a walk a “free pass” and other phrases that signified that he was trying too hard. Unless you’re Vin Scully, you should really just talk like regular people talk; if you’re not being noticed, you’re doing your job.

Between-inning features: It’s tough to fill an extra 34 minutes of time, and during the Cards-Brewers game, that was evident. Tours of the Cardinals museum, a look at the time a ball caromed off Jose Canseco’s head for a home run, and other filler wasn’t all that much better than commercials.

The Bad

Rotating Analysts and Sideline Reporters: The idea seems like a good one: Every week, Braun is joined in the booth by one analyst connected to each team, and a sideline reporter who works in the home market. But in the first two games, the only analyst who actually worked in the booth for one of the teams was John Kruk, who works Phillies games. Otherwise, the analysts were all MLB Network studio guys: Cliff Floyd (played for the Mets), Joe Magrane (played for the Cards) and Dan Plesac (played for the Brewers).

This leads to analysis that isn’t very deep, mispronounced names, and painfully awkward monologues, like every time Magrane opened his mouth. Wouldn’t it be better if both analysts actually did the team’s games? They’re in the area anyway. How hard would it have been to have, for example, Ron Darling, who does Mets games for SNY, in that first week both instead of Floyd? I mean, the guy works for MLBN in the offseason!

Same goes for the sideline reporters. The first week was Alexa Datt, who worked for MLB.com last year and was just hired by MLBN to do studio work. She was great. Week 2 had Hanna Yates, an in-game host for the St. Louis Blues and a local sports reporter. She was nervous and stiff. The rotating booth and sideline doesn’t build any kind of chemistry, and gives an inconsistent product from week to week.

The Facebook Watch Bug: This identifier was added for week 2, and I don’t have to put a circle around it in order to point it out. To say it was too big is an understatement:

Comments/Photos/etc.: This is supposed to be the differentiator between a FB Watch game and any ol’ game on TV. But, like you’d expect, 90% of the comments, all of which streamed up far too quickly to read, were complaints about the announcers, the camerawork, the fact that people had to watch it on their computers, the fact that it’s not part of the MLB package, etc. Some extra-snarky people complained that they shouldn’t leave their personal data vulnerable just to watch a ballgame (thanks, Cambridge Analytica!)  Others loved the ability to watch at work or on the road, and others loved having access to their favorite out-of-market team. Very little of the comments were actually about the game. They only got game-focused when Braun prompted viewers to send in questions for the managers.

Realize that posting online comments or using comments to make a second-screen experience is pretty much something any network can do. And thankfully, Facebook gives you a way to turn off the comments as well as the constant stream of Like and reaction bubbles. But it’s definitely not the killer app it’s intended to be. But that doesn’t mean that the folks at FB don’t have something up their sleeves for later this year or next season.

No ability to handle a rain delay: The Mets-Phillies game started 45 minutes late due to rain. The broadcast came back periodically with updates, but in between those updates, they just displayed this:

There needed to be a contingency plan, like playing MLB Tonight or some sort of studio show. Otherwise, coming back to what was a glorified test pattern felt very 1970s.

The stability of the live feed: I’m on Verizon Fios, and even streaming from my laptop to my Chromecast via WiFi, there should be plenty of bandwidth to give me a strong, consistent stream. However, the stream not only juddered in places, but completely froze a couple of times, leading me to recast. Others with less robust connections complained of frozen screens, picture out of sync with audio, and other issues. Nothing worse than pissing off sports fans, as any cable company knows when the service goes out during a game. FB needs to ensure their feed is rock solid if they want to do more live events in the coming years.

Yes, there’s work to do. But MLB on Facebook Watch is off to a decent start, despite what folks like Keith Olbermann think:

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch MLB games on Facebook Watch