Anyone who has ever watched a World Series
game is familiar with the work of Harry Coyle. A
director who spent 42 years creating the on-air
look of baseball games, he was the thread connecting the
first 35 televised World Series, and his innovations changed
productions throughout the sports world.

“Harry was one of those rare, most fortunate people
whose love was what he did so well,” says Michael Weisman,
former Executive Producer of NBC Sports. “His interest and
his love, sports and telling stories with his cameras, were
what he did for a living.”

After serving as a fighter pilot in the Armed Forces, Coyle
was a part-time director at NBC before joining the network fulltime
in 1955, where he quickly became a fixture in the world
of baseball. Coyle took the black-and-white, three-camera
broadcasts of the 1940s into the 14-camera future, introducing
hand-held cameras, close-ups, and player reactions into his 36
World Series and 27 All-Star Game productions.

In the 1950s, Coyle introduced a center-field camera that
allowed viewers to follow the path of a pitch all the way
into the catcher’s mitt. The angled camera, now standard in
baseball coverage, was a radical departure from the above–
home-plate, infield angle.

“He was a big proponent of the close-up,” Weisman
explains. “He really believed that the eyes were the window
to the soul. He pioneered the reaction shot, showing what
players were doing not just on the field but on the sidelines
and in the dugout.”

Coyle’s most famous reaction shot came in Game Six of the
1975 World Series. Boston’s Carlton Fisk led off the bottom of
the 12th inning, and Coyle directed the cameraman inside the
Green Monster to follow the ball, but a large rat had stolen
the cameraman’s attention. Petrified, the cameraman never
moved as Fisk hit the game-winning home run, and he caught
Fisk as he frantically motioned for his left-field hit to stay fair. It
was one of the first shots of an athlete’s emotion captured in
the moment and made Coyle a directorial prodigy.

Although the director was as powerful an executive as any
in the business, he never acted like one.

“He was never pretentious, which you might expect from
someone with his success and stature,” Weisman says. “He was
a man of the people. He was more comfortable with the crew,
the engineers, and the camera guys than with the team owners
and network executives that sought out his company.”

Coyle’s gruff voice and John Wayne-like demeanor
were found more often in trucks than in executive suites.
“Instead of eating in the team executive room, he would
be happier with a Big Mac and a Coke, sitting in the truck
with his boys,” Weisman says. “He called his cameramen
his boys, and he was very much one of them.”

In addition to the close-up shots that distinguished
his work, Coyle also introduced slow motion and instant
replay to baseball games, forever focusing on the story,
not the statistics.

“Although there’s a long list of technical contributions that
Harry brought, I think his greatest contribution is that he’s a
storyteller with his cameras,” Weisman says. “Harry told the
story with his cameras while the people he worked with—
Hall of Fame broadcasters like Red Barber, Curt Gowdy, Vin
Scully, and Bob Costas—told the story with their words.”

Since Coyle’s retirement in 1989, little has changed in
baseball production, which is a testament to the standard
he set. There may be more than one way to shoot a game,
but Coyle found the best way to share baseball’s stories
with the world, and his work remains the yardstick against
which every production is measured.