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Credit: Netflix
Netflix’s second crack at live baseball came with a built-in advantage: the Home Run Derby doesn’t need much help to be entertaining. Strip away the ceremony, and it’s just batting practice with stakes, and this year, MLB handed the streamer a genuine upgrade by scrapping the countdown clock in favor of a format that lets hitters keep swinging as long as they’re producing. It’s the best change the event has seen in years, and it deserved a broadcast that didn’t get in its own way.
For long stretches, Netflix delivered that. For other stretches, it seemed determined not to.
Start with the good, because there’s a lot of it. Untethering the Derby from a timer was an easy, obvious improvement, and it’s the rare format tweak that generated no real pushback. Well, besides maybe Jeff Passan. The new setup rewards hot streaks instead of racing a clock, and it made for a night with a noticeably different rhythm than derbies past. Whatever else went wrong Monday night, the league deserves full credit for finally fixing this.
The picture itself, in the moments the broadcast let you see it clearly, backed that up. The image was sharp, the graphics package was clean and legible — almost to a fault — and this was a clear step forward from Netflix’s Opening Night broadcast back in March, if only because the network mostly resisted the urge to remind viewers every few minutes that they were watching Netflix.
Mostly.
But before the swinging started, Netflix leaned on Will Ferrell, Jimmy Tatro, and Luke Wilson to open the broadcast, and the segment landed with a thud. The audio made it hard to hear what anyone was saying, the comedy felt manufactured rather than spontaneous, and the whole bit doubled as an ad for a Netflix original. It’s the same instinct that dragged down the network’s Opening Night pregame in March — a reflexive need to cross-promote the platform’s other content — just in a smaller dose this time.
Elle Duncan’s aside about the 1996 Derby being a topic of enduring conversation in Philadelphia, which Philadelphia sports fans were quick to note isn’t actually true, was a minor unforced error in the same vein.
But the pregame, promos, and all were never going to be the story of the night. Once the players stepped in and the swings started counting, the broadcast had to stand on its own, and that’s where the real test began.
The lounge pairing of Duncan, Barry Bonds, and Albert Pujols had the makings of the better booth, and the set itself worked. But calling live swings wasn’t where Bonds and Pujols were comfortable, and the commentary came out vanilla and subdued — pleasant, but not adding much to what was already on screen. Duncan held her own despite not being the one expected to call the action, and the read on her was fair: this wasn’t a knock on her so much as a format that didn’t play to the group’s strengths.
There’s an easy fix sitting right there, too, as The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand noted. Instead of parking the lounge as a standalone set, Netflix could use it as a between-batters destination, where they bring a hitter over for a quick conversation with Bonds and Pujols once his round wraps, rather than sending Lauren Shehadi or CC Sabathia to chase an interview down mid-swing. It would give the lounge a job beyond commentary and solve the in-game interview problem in the same move.
The preference, when the ball was actually in the air, ran toward the crew of Matt Vasgersian, Anthony Rizzo, and Hunter Pence. Rizzo was the standout of the group, sharp and insightful whenever the conversation turned to mechanics, which is exactly the kind of expertise a Derby booth should lean on. Hunter Pence brought real energy too — he was clearly locked in and into the moment, and that enthusiasm read as one of the booth’s better qualities. Where the group as a whole stumbled was in occasionally tipping past that energy into over-the-top territory during routine swings, something that applied to Rizzo, Pence, and Vasgersian alike at various points.
Chris Berman spent decades hollering his way through this exact event and never once sounded like he was performing enthusiasm rather than feeling it; the swings earned the volume. Monday’s booth hadn’t figured out that distinction yet, and by the third round of manufactured hysteria, the excitement had started to cancel itself out.
Neither booth had a poor showing. One added insight and energy but occasionally ran hot; the other was pleasant and composed but rarely had much to say. A happy medium between the two was exactly what was missing.
If there’s one throughline in how this broadcast will be remembered, it’s the camera work, and not in a good way.
The Home Run Derby has one job: show the ball leaving the bat and show where it lands. Netflix, with its cinematic ambitions, treated that job as optional. Tight close-ups on hitters’ faces during their swings repeatedly cost viewers the actual moment of contact, and the broadcast leaned on those close-ups instead of following the ball in flight. On at least one stretch, the camera stayed locked on the pitcher through consecutive swings from Jordan Walker, which is about as far as you can get from what anyone tuned in to see.
It wasn’t a matter of a broadcast finding its footing over the course of the night, either, as the same complaint kept surfacing swing after swing. The frustration turned into something close to a consensus among viewers: a Home Run Derby doesn’t need much more than a shot behind the pitcher and a shot on the ball’s landing spot, and Netflix kept finding ways to use neither. There was no shortage of suggestions for a fix, either, with multiple viewers noting that simply holding the camera on the hitter through contact and then following the ball would solve the entire problem. It’s a two-camera fix for a production with far more cameras than that at its disposal.
The absence of exit velocity data compounded the issue. Between the missing numbers and the wrong camera angles, a broadcast built around a single visceral moment — bat meets ball — kept finding ways to obscure that exact moment.
Then there was the non-call. Junior Caminero’s final swing of the round sent a ball down the left field line, and by the look on his face, he thought it was fair — which would have kept his turn going. Netflix never showed a replay, so nobody watching ever got to find out if he was right. A broadcast that spent the night favoring close-ups over the ball’s flight ran into the one moment where that habit actually cost something.
This was a broadcast pulling in two directions. The format Netflix inherited from MLB was close to perfect, the picture was frequently excellent, and the network mostly avoided the self-promotional bloat that weighed down its Opening Night debut. But the actual job of a Home Run Derby broadcast — showing the swing, showing the flight, showing where the ball lands — kept getting lost to close-ups, ill-timed interviews, and a director seemingly more interested in mood than information. Netflix has the format and the infrastructure. What it still needs is the discipline to point the camera at the baseball.
The post Netflix fixed the Home Run Derby’s biggest problem and created a new one appeared first on Awful Announcing.
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