MLB 2022: Audio Teams Look To Capture More Sound More Accurately

Each ballpark poses its own set of sonic, acoustic challenges

With Major League Baseball’s 2022 season opening today, multiple broadcasters are planning busy schedules. And their audio teams are prepping a variety of approaches to capture the sound of the action in baseball’s diverse roster of venues.

Fox Sports will start airing its usual Saturday game of the week in June, and Fox Sports 1 will have a slate of games on Saturdays and some weeknights. ESPN is staying with Sunday nights and occasional weeknights. Meanwhile, MLB Network will continue to air home-game telecasts that don’t fall within a national-network broadcast window. And Turner Sports will present a new Tuesday-night slate on TBS.

MLB Network will air the Chicago Cubs–Milwaukee Brewers 2022 season opener at Wrigley Field.

Another Kind of Home Run

At Fox Sports, Joe Carpenter is back as senior mixer (and as A1 for MLB Network’s Showcase games when they resume) and audio supervisor. The broadcaster is again deploying Home Run Production (HRP) workflow, which it initiated in 2018.

“We’re pretty much picking up from where we left off last season,” Carpenter says, “but there’s still a lot to it.”

Audio sources vary from stadium to stadium, but all send a basic FX feed comprising at least bat cracks, crowd sound, and usually a first-base microphone. That starts a process that, though technically sophisticated, depends heavily on the human eye and ear.

The first challenge is to synchronize the effects feeds with the video in the production truck. That varies, Carpenter says, based on the types of equipment, such as converters and encoders, used in each production environment.

“The challenge for audio,” he explains, “is that you wait until the control room times out all the video and now you’ve got to time out your audio with each source. For your live show, it’s fairly easy: you can use batting practice to set your sync.

“The second level of the challenge,” he continues, “is a day game that followed a night game and there is no batting practice. You may end up trying to time your bat cracks with the [groundskeeper’s] pounding the dirt for the pitcher’s mound, something on the field that gives you a transient to lock onto. And there are a number of things in the [signal] chain that can still cause audio to go out of sync.”

Critical harmonizations of sound and picture extend to each camera-mounted microphone on the production, which must be properly timed with the picture coming from replays. Sometimes Carpenter finds himself well into the first inning before everything is fully caught up.

“It might take me four or five pitches to get the bat cracks lined up in time,” he says. “I’m pretty good at it, but, [without] batting practice, they throw the first pitch of the game, and you’re like, Here we go; let’s see how close I am.”

Not certain for this season but high on his wish list is to have pouches sewn into players’ jerseys (à la the NBA) for wiring each athlete for sound for the All-Star Game and the World Series, both of which Fox Sports is broadcasting this year.

One curve ball this season is the arrival of Joe Davis as lead baseball announcer, replacing Joe Buck, who has departed to become the voice of Monday Night Football on ESPN.

“Every announcer has a different style and energy and approach,” notes Carpenter. “You just have to find where it sits in the mix.”

Hurray for the Array

At Turner Sports, sound designer Dave Grundtvig, who will be finishing up his basketball duties as MLB season arrives, looks to bring over an idea successfully deployed for hoops and NFL games. In consultation with MLB, he plans to replace some parabolic microphones with remotely controllable transducer arrays: specifically, Shure’s MXA710 linear-array product.

Originally developed for conference-room types of applications, the unit uses Shure’s proprietary IntelliMix DSP and Autofocus processing, allowing the A1 or a submixer to change each of its six or eight transducers’ lobe configurations to more finely aim at different areas of the field for effects. For instance, a single array unit could be reconfigured during a game to account not only for left- and right-handed batters but also for their stance nuances, ensuring that bat cracks are sharp and present every time.

“The arrays are steerable,” Grundtvig points out, “and we can make the lobes wider or narrower as needed — and do it on the fly remotely. [The arrays] could replace a number of shotgun and parab mics on the field, but we do need MLB’s approval.”

He says that the linear arrays he deployed for football to pick up general ambience and for basketball, attaching them to hoop stanchions to capture the dynamic transients of the ball against metal, prove the concept for broadcast audio.

Another new wrinkle this season will be the use of Q5X digital transmitters in the bases. They’ll be part of a broader use of Turner Sports’ Base Cam, which was introduced during the 2020 American League Division Series (ALDS) and American League Championship Series (ALCS) and may be used this season on Turner’s Tuesday-night games as well as for the postseason. The Q5X transmitters will be the second microphone on each bag, used to eliminate the latency of the audio embedded with the Base Cam’s video signal.

“Between the [nature of the] embedded audio and the RF delay from the bag, it can create enough latency to be a problem,” Grundtvig explains. “The second microphone will be its own direct audio channel.”

Innovations are important for baseball in particular, he adds, because each ballpark is acoustically and sonically unique — unlike NFL gridirons, NBA courts, and NHL ice, all of which are tightly standardized.

“We will still use the conventional tools for sports sound for baseball — the shotguns and the parabolics — but because each ballpark has its own sound, it’s great to have some other tools we can use to search for and pick up more nuance,” he says. “Every baseball stadium has its own characteristics, and those are what we’re looking to capture.”