Two weeks at the ballpark

I've always said, "The worst day I ever spent with baseball was a great day." But 12 straight days?

Yes, 12 straight days at the College Baseball World Series in Omaha working for ESPN provides the content for the first chapter in Max's, "How I spent my summer vacation" book. My journey actually began in 1967 when I played baseball for Knox College. But Div. III of the NCAA does not send teams to the CWS. Shoot, we didn't even make the playoffs for the Midwest Conference.

Step two of the journey was when I spent my first year out of college teaching English in a suburban Minneapolis junior high. I became a volunteer assistant coach at the University of Minnesota, then a powerhouse in the Big Ten. That's where I first heard about the College World Series.

My next stop was the University of Missouri where I began grad school in 1971 and joined the baseball staff as a volunteer grad assistant. I spent four years with theat program, but we never won the Big Eight and never had the chance to go to Omaha.

For the past 23 years I have lived some three hours from Omaha. I have followed college baseball religiously all of that time, but due to a variety of summer school and family obligations, I never had the chance to attend the CWS. And I had always wanted to.

That time finally came when an old grad school classmate connected me with the production manager of ESPN. When Ed Placey contacted me and asked if I knew anything about ptiching, I was tempted to give him the reply St. Louis Cardinal pitcher Bob Gibson gave his young catcher Tim McCarver on his first trip to the mound, "All you know about pitching is you can't hit it."

I can't hit it, and I have been proving that weekly as I play in my 20th season of Men's Senior Baseball. But I did convince Placey I knew enough about it to chart pitches, spot trends and suggest how that could best be presented on TV.

But that was pretty much the extent of my instruction. ESPN set up a work station in the equipment room right off the home team clubhouse. MY only contact with the outside world (and ESPN) was three monitors and a headset. Two hours into my work, two gentlemen from Omaha came in and started setting up computers. Greg and Steve were with a company called Game Plan and they were going to demnostrate for ESPN and the college pitching coaches a new piece of software that would help them analyze pitching.

While they had created, tested and sold similar software for football, basketball, and volleyball, this was their first time field testing the baseball program. The first two days were frustrating as I hand-charted the pitchers in the first four games. I offered almost nothing to the producers that they didn't already have from another source.

By the time each team started playing its second game, the value of the computer-based information was starting to show through. We had devleoped a database of batter, count, pitch type, result. From that you could see patterns emerge. Once I mentioned to Greg I'd really like to see the difference between how a certain pitcher was pitching left and right-handed batters. So Greg popped the program open, wrote several lines of C++, and presto, I had my data.

Now we were cooking.

During the next several days, Greg wrote a number of other changes into the program. As the program became more sophisticated, I worked with sideline reproter Kyle Peterson and his producer Tom Scofield to extract more from the data. By the time we reached the best two out of three championship playoff between eventual champion Oregon State and North Carolina, we knew some things about their pitchers their coaches didn't know.

I prepared scouting reports for each game that included charts and graphs with pitching and hitting tendencies. For example, I found North Carolina made outs on the first pitch 26 times in three games, while Oregon State made outs on the first pitch 16 times in five games. I found out relief ace Kevin Gunderson of OSU threw first pitch fastballs even though he was predominantly a slider pitcher. Those kinds of nuggest become pretty valuable in forecasting what will happen or explaining why something did happen.

Perhaps the biggest difference in working this event was the fact our crew of some 60 members was there together for 12 days. On most sports productions we come to a town, spend one day setting up, one day doing the game, and then we are all out of there. This event had more of a summer camp feel to it. We were there 12-13 hours per day, ate all of our meals together, and spent some of the off hours together as well. The comaraderie was impressive.

We only had one minor crisis. Our caterer who also works int he Hollywood movie business was aksed to leave in the middle of the first week. Seems one of the security guards heard some rustling in the catering truck around 3 in the morning. When he opened the door to check it out, several mice came charging out fo the truck. As you might expect that didn't go over very well with the Omaha City Health Department. The next day a local hotel was catering our meals. The did a ncie job, but didn't have the frills of the original Hollywood gang.

ESPN provided two meals per day. The Omaha World passed out free newspapers, and by the time the games were over, I was too tired to go out and do anything. I did not spend one single penny my first four days there.

I enjoyed every minute of those 12 days. I wasn't sure how this old body would stand up to working a succession of 12 hour days. Actually, I probably couldn't WORK 12 hours several straight days.

But this was baseball!