Baseball doesn’t have to be this complicated

How about this – let’s not take a look at the “K-Zone”!

Watching baseball on television is… How about this – let’s not take a look at the “K-Zone”!

Watching baseball on television is starting to become like going to an NBA game – a big distraction from what you’re actually interested in.

Apparently, television minds feel the average baseball fan has the attention span of a goldfish. And to compensate, they have made the process of viewing a game something that should come with a warning like a video game, that the constantly blinking lights and graphics might induce epileptic shock.

Take the “K-Zone” for example. ESPN has decided that the next evolutionary step in baseball is to draw a rectangle on the screen around the strike zone. As the ball approaches the plate in the slow-motion replay, they put a tracker and crosshairs on it that follow the ball until it reaches the catcher, at which point the ball is replaced by a circle that shows where it entered or missed the strike zone.

Is this necessary? If you know anything about the game, you know where the strike zone is. If you don’t know anything about the game, you discover quickly that the pitcher is trying to hurl the little sphere over the white polygon on the ground. We don’t need the tracking system from a fighter jet to show us where the ball goes.

Or how about the priority score alert? It’s not enough that scores are constantly scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Every time somebody scores in another baseball game, we get blinking on the ticker that says priority score alert, followed by one of the team’s run totals lighting up like a letter on “Wheel of Fortune” and turning around. God forbid we wait 90 seconds to find out that the Devil Rays gave up another four-spot.

Meanwhile, everything else that pops up on the screen is moving. Statistics for a pitcher entering the game have to do a spin move, complete with sound effects, and they have to come up in two shifts. Meanwhile, the network can’t even advertise another game in the series without making a graphic that looks something like a slot machine, flipping around a bunch of times while making a noise like a baseball card stuck in bicycle spokes.

Even the final score isn’t safe in these broadcasts. When the Phillies beat the Astros in Game 5 of the 1980 NLCS – a game I watch at least five times a year and one of the greatest games in history – the final score simply showed teams, runs, hits, errors. In Monday night’s early-season Phillies-Braves game, the final score had a bunch of different colors, plus these pulses of light that kept shooting across the top and bottom of the graphic.

Spock called – he wants his phaser back.

ESPN is by no means the only culprit here. Take FOX, the same people who brought you the giant robot graphics in the mid- to late-’90s. The ‘bots are scrap iron now, but FOX has replaced them with even more brilliant attention-grabbing ideas.

We’ve had catcher’s helmet cam, then we took a step backward to diamond cam, which is a camera shoved into the dirt around the plate. Can’t wait to see what’s next. Concession-stand cam? (“Meanwhile, let’s have a look at some water ice transactions