“The Sporting Image” is the summer 2024 edition of the Notebook Insert, a seasonal supplement on moving-image culture.
Illustration by Ivy Johnson.
A writer needs a pen, a painter needs a brush. But a filmmaker...a filmmaker needs an army.
—Orson Welles
You never miss the water until your well runs dry, and four years ago, it was one such bout of baseball deficiency that inspired my first attempt to wax poetic on the subject of America’s pastime. I had taken for granted that baseball blossoms every spring, and now I felt its absence acutely, one more emergency precaution amid the weltschmerz of that first pandemic season. Fans and players alike anxiously awaited an opening day that wasn’t certain to arrive. But in due time, Major League Baseball worked out the kinks, drafted its best attempt at safety protocols, and the show went on—as it must!
So it was that one afternoon in late July 2020, on the most anticipated Opening Day in recent memory, my brain shattered into a million pieces and refashioned itself in the shape of a baseball. With citywide COVID-19 regulations keeping fans from attending games at Citi Field, I threw myself headfirst into television coverage. To me, legally housebound and glued to my desk at a make-work email job, day-game broadcasts were transmissions from another dimension, where certain structural certainties prevailed: even if braying fans had been replaced by docile cardboard cut-outs, three strikes were still an out, four balls a walk. Credit is due to my long-suffering and much-beloved New York Mets, whose losing record that truncated season (only 60 games, rather than the usual 162) provided a sense of normalcy when I needed it most.
As luck would have it, I picked a fantastic time to become a religious baseball viewer. The Mets are known for their almost superhuman capacity for defeat, but this season felt different—even the most humiliating loss possessed an energizing and exciting quality. Their poor performance, already an afterthought for devoted fans, became a moot point entirely. Seemingly overnight, unmistakable recreations of Brian De Palma’s signature split-diopter shots, or the tensely framed white hat / black hat over-the-shoulder showdowns of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, became a regular feature of Mets games. In addition to covering pitcher versus catcher in a wide shot from center field, two full-sized close-ups of the opposing players—their furrowed brows and forehead flop sweat in crystal-clear focus—routinely filled the screen. A genuine homage to A Fistful of Dollars (1964) emitting from the SNY antenna wasn’t a figment of our collective imagination, but a new standard in sports broadcasting. New York is a movie town, and it seemed our civic love of the seventh art had finally leapt out of the cinema and onto the baseball diamond.
New York Mets pitcher Max Scherzer goes into his wind-up against San Diego Padres center fielder Trent Grisham. Image courtesy of SNY.
This sudden uptick in Hollywood movie references was no coincidence. That same year, film-school graduate and local-kid-made-good John DeMarsico took the helm as Mets Game Director for SNY (SportsNet New York, our local cable network) and brought to the role a style, sophistication, and sense of humor that ranks far ahead of the competition. Ever the funhouse mirror of American life—with all its transgressions, frustrations, innovations, and contradictions—baseball wrested from the pandemic’s heart of darkness the same ingenuity and playfulness found that summer in the city’s outdoor dance parties, picnics, and convergences.
Mets broadcasts had long been distinguished by our unusually erudite, wisecracking hosts: play-by-play announcer Gary Cohen and color commentators Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling of the World Series–winning 1986 Mets. Under DeMarsico’s direction, the regular-season coverage of Mets games has attained crossover status as must-see-TV for baseball freaks and cinephiles alike (the overlap is considerable), earning the adoration of viewers well outside the Tri-state Area. Not a week goes by when some iconic play, artfully rendered, does not make a viral splash across the realm of sport. In the years since his ascent to the director’s chair, DeMarsico has presented compilations of the broadcasts’ most cinematic moments to packed houses at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and introduced a series of baseball films at Chinatown’s Metrograph cinema. The broadcast, DeMarsico says, is designed to make fans in the stands jealous of their peers watching on the couch.
In 2022, DeMarsico first preempted the commercial break between the eighth and ninth innings to follow Mets closer Edwin Díaz’s matador-like walk to the pitching mound. Pitching changes are prime real estate for the game’s advertisers, and sticking with Diaz in a single handheld shot from the bullpen to the bump was an unorthodox move. Writing in the 2023 edition of Baseball Prospectus, author David Roth praised the SNY crew for “[choosing] the action in the ballpark over those paving stone ads.” It’s a moment that can only be described as “cinematic”: the Puerto Rican All-Star strides, cap held to his chest, toward the mound as “Narco” by DJs Blasterjaxx and Timmy Trumpets grows to a klezmer-like crescendo of horns and beating drums. Fans rise to their feet, and the broadcast cross-cuts from the cacophony of the crowd to the lone figure at the center of the field. A masterpiece of suspense and hero-worship, it would be right at home on the syllabus of any film-school editing class. The gamble paid off, launching imitators across the Major Leagues, with stadiums doubling down on dramatic entrances and other broadcasters scrambling to recreate the “Diaz effect.”
New York Mets closer Edwin Díaz enters a game.
The twin spectacles of baseball and cinema share a parallel timeline, from their nascence in the late 19th century to their mass-media dominance in the middle-20th—and, regrettably, their loosening hold on the popular imagination in the new millennium. Although doomsayers at the ballpark and the multiplex tout the decline of these sacred artforms, each season finds DeMarsico and company pushing their practice to new heights, reconfiguring the tropes of mainstream sports broadcasting into a fresh and vital visual language. Eager to see how the ballpark sausage gets made, I spent June’s final Sunday game with the SNY crew, from their call time until the last out, embedded among the technicians, producers, designers, and statisticians that turn every game into a blockbuster.
John DeMarsico may be the most public face of SNY’s groundbreaking broadcasts, but the affable, bear-like director is no vulgar auteurist. “A director is only as good as his crew,” DeMarsico likes to say, and he counts among his platoon a tight-knit group of veteran cameramen, replay technicians, technical directors, and graphics designers whose work makes up the meat of every show. Just outside the stadium at left field, “parked out by the garbage,” DeMarsico jokes, is the SNY “truck,” a behemoth mobile studio kept at a consistent meat-locker temperature. On the morning of my visit, as he does during the other 161 regular season games, John sits before a wall of screens while flanked by technical director Seth Zwiebel and senior producer Gregg Picker. They’re a merry trio of fast-talking kibbitzers who man the helm with a language all their own.
If an ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure, the exchange rate is even more favorable on a film set. And just as a director and cinematographer leave ample time to block the scene and light the stars before the camera rolls, the SNY team enters a game with a foundation in place to take the broadcast wherever it needs to go. DeMarsico’s work as director is a feat of live editing, directing each cut by calling out camera numbers and effects in real time: “Ready three. Take three. Ready five. Under-dissolve five. Ready fourteen. De Palma fourteen.” These labors seamlessly convey to the viewers at home a base hit, a double play, or a slide into home plate. As senior producer, Picker spends the game liaising between the truck and the broadcast booth, feeding factoids to Cohen, Hernandez, and Darling and guiding their commentary toward the game’s larger narratives.
Every work day starts with the same pre-game ritual. To test the audio sync between the stadium and master control, the crew replays Mets manager emeritus Terry Collins’s “Hope” speech, delivered during a 2011 post-game presser after six straight losses. “It’s just a perfect lip sync test, and the folks at master control know exactly how it’s supposed to look,” John says. “I’ve listened to that clip every day for over a decade.” This kind of tech requirement turned in-joke reveals a light relationship to Mets lore. “Sunday games have a more laid-back vibe,” DeMarsico adds, and if my visit is any indicator, this crew knows how to keep it breezy. Seemingly unlimited boxes of popcorn and bags of cookies appear almost out of thin air. DeMarsico's seventh-inning sushi order shares desk space with copious notes, lists of network-mandated sponsor shoutouts, and multiple scorecards. One screen is locked on a feed of the England-Slovakia Euro Cup match, so associate director Eddie Wahrman can keep up between innings. Midway through the game, Gregg doles out slices of “Philly Fluff” cake to his crew and wraps the old-time cloth string from the pastry box around his wrist, where it remains through a two-plus-hour rain delay and extra innings.
New York Mets closer Edwin Díaz stares in to Washington Nationals left fielder Juan Soto. Image courtesy of SNY.
“The producer in sports television is a little bit like the coach,” Picker likes to say. “And the director is a little like the quarterback.” At the risk of further mixing sports metaphors, Seth Zwiebel’s work as technical director makes him a sort of running back: if John is calling the play, Seth’s prep work to design camera effects and transitions is what moves the ball down the field. “I do the Mets, and the Yankees also,” Zwiebel says. “So I get to see both worlds. Where [the Yankees broadcast] is a little more straight, John gives us a good opportunity to do some interesting things on this show.”
That split-screen framing of a tense showdown between a pitcher and a batter facing a full count doesn’t happen on the fly: it takes considerable time for Zwiebel and DeMarsico to ideate and implement the effects that make SNY’s broadcasts so fun to watch. “Sometimes I’ll get a text [from John],” Zweibel adds. “He says, ‘I’ve got this idea for an effect, I want to do something from Planet of the Apes, like the Statue of Liberty shot.’ He’ll send me a clip that we want to pay homage to, I’ll build an effect similar to that. A lot of times I’m wondering how we’re going to build this into a baseball broadcast. Like, ‘Really, we’re going to show this on the screen tonight?’”
Working on this crew affords Zwiebel a certain amount of creative latitude—and the crew’s close proximity over 162 games leaves plenty of room for ideation. “Each effect takes a few hours, and I’ll work on them all season long,” Zwiebel says. Recently, the two landed on a new idea at the same time: the whip pan, used to great effect in bases-loaded situations.
The New York Yankees come to bat against the New York Mets, with inspiration and audio taken from Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968).
Many of the longtime technicians and cameramen on the SNY crew cut their teeth for smaller stations or other teams in the area. “I started working for Comcast in high school at 16,” Zwiebel continues. “I started working at SNY in 2012. A lot of these same camera guys came up from the same system and Cathy, who's doing graphics, did a lot of the same sports with me when I was a teenager. They all learned from the same director [Bill Webb], and we’ve had to adapt. It’s been fun, I like what John’s doing. We get a chance to max out the switcher. We’ll get other people who work at the MLB Network asking, ‘How do you do that?’”
On any given day, in any given ballpark, baseball fans will witness something they’ve never seen before: a chaotic error or hair-raising play gives birth to a new stat or factoid for the reference books. Banal quietude turns on a dime into a thrilling contender for the highlight reel, and the SNY crew, who’ve seen just about everything, aren’t immune to the excitement. Despite the truck’s proximity to the field, just a stone’s throw from what remain of Willets Point’s chop shops, DeMarsico claims he hasn’t seen a game from inside a ballpark in ten years. But when Brandon Nimmo hits a game-tying two-run homer at the bottom of the seventh, DeMarsico rises to his feet, calling out camera numbers with lightning speed to match the swift-footed center fielder as he rounds the bases. Frosting the cake is an SNY hallmark: Zwiebel’s cross-dissolve from Nimmo’s grinning visage to the Mets’ signature home run apple, which rises from a large cavity in the grandstands, 408 feet from the batter’s box.
In the four years since DeMarsico took the director’s chair, the crew has developed a psychic intimacy, anticipating each other’s instincts and impulses. “We don’t even need to talk,” says Picker. “We’re a show that takes a lot of chances, and we’re extremely fortunate. Our technicians here are so skilled, and so good at their craft, it allows us to be aggressive and do things we can’t always do on the road.” It’s this decidedly human element, Picker says, that makes their show an outlier. “Even though we take what we do seriously, we try not to take ourselves too seriously. If we make a mistake, we try not to cover it up. We make fun of each other, we laugh. And by being genuine, that human component of what we do translates to the viewers.”
Top: New York Mets closer Edwin Díaz prepares to enter the game. Bottom: SNY cameraman Pete Stendel gets the shot. Images courtesy of SNY.
Veteran cameraman Pete Stendel, who mans the handheld rig at Mets broadcasts, remembers fondly an early outing as a production assistant on Rocky II (1979). Tanned and lean, Stendel serves as the broadcast’s legs, covering everything from dugout-clearing home-run celebrations to errant wildlife (and the occasional Nathan’s hot dog container, or beach ball) on the outfield. Reminiscing in the crew breakroom, Stendel—decked out in heady bracelets and a tie-dye shirt—recounted his journey from the set to the stands. “I’ve been shooting baseball since ’81 or ’82,” he says, with the faintest hint of a Philadelphia accent under his gravely baritone. “I get to be the ‘wild card’ camera. We do coverage on my camera, but we also play with it—we can make our own little movie with it.”
Stendel fancies himself a “Renaissance man,” and the crew agrees: his paintings decorate the walls of the crew’s nearby break room, and he’s made it onto the broadcast as a slapstick “plant” during a cutaway gag back in 2013. Instead of reining in and standardizing this “wild card” coverage, the SNY crew embraces those creative impulses. The cameraman’s inspiration can come from surprising places.
“I’ve got a great backyard, it’s got great morning light,” Stendel says. “I took my eldest son in the backyard when he was 5, 6 years old with a little Polaroid camera. We would look at the light coming through the trees, how it would rest on flowers. ... I see things that other people don’t see, and [John] lets me incorporate fun stuff that I see into the telecast. Every once in a while you’ve gotta shake the rug, and it works. It’s embraced by a lot of the people who watch our show.”
Biff Ponders Lipstick Applications (Pete Stendel). Photograph by the author.
Much of that warm embrace has come from the film community, a group especially attenuated to the subtle messages and secret codes of visual storytelling. For cinephiles and Mets fans—two houses, both alike in indignity—watching an SNY broadcast can feel like a great night at the movies. Those of us opting to stay in and watch the game, in lieu of attending a rep screening or industry party, find ample pleasure in the artfully crafted narrative and nods to A-list auteurs. For the often-dispirited club fans, the genius of this crew can take the sting out of a bitter loss or sweeten a victory in this “game of inches.” In a July 10 matchup against the Washington Nationals, shortstop Francisco Lindor hit a two-out, two-run homer to cut the Nationals’ lead in half. “Give the camera operator an award for this Jumbotron shot,” tweeted the online media personality (and die-hard Yankees fan) Jomboy, praising cameraman Kenny Desantis’s elegant zoom out from Lindor on the Jumbotron to the man himself as he crossed home plate in the foreground.
New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor homers against Washington Nationals pitcher Jake Irvin.
When I began my journey from pint-sized cinephile to intermittent auteur, it hadn’t occurred to me that learning how to make films would detract from the pleasure of watching them. Rather than allowing myself to be passively swept away, I started keeping one foot “on the ground,” determined to demystify the techniques at work. To this day, whether in a dark theater or alone at home, my mind delves into the bramble patch of technique and machination. It’s a fine line to walk, but my practice as a director, a writer, and even a viewer has been enriched by this knowledge. Every film is both a pleasure cruise and a master class, and I’ve learned to divide my attention accordingly. My passions are appetites, and when I love something I want nothing less than to devour it entirely, to absorb every secret and leave no stone unturned.
Sunday’s game finally ended after a customary Mets defeat, but even in a sport celebrated for its slow-cinema pace, the day flew by. It was a bittersweet capper to a spectacular, meme-filled month of victories. When I tuned in the next evening, I heard the voices of DeMarsico, Picker, and Zwiebel echoing in my head alongside the cut-up commentary of our booth. Rather than taking me out of the ballgame, the chance to peek behind the scenes of SNY’s process brought me even closer to it. Watching the boys in Flushing bounce back with a win against the Washington Nationals, I celebrated twice over: once for my beloved team, and again for the small army of brilliant working artists who give us a reason to cheer.
