Did ESPN purposely select replays of Holliday’s slide that were less revealing?
ESPN’s Sportscenter used at least two different sets of highlights when replaying Colorado’s Matt Holliday’s slide into home vs. the Padres. On the Sportscenter show that aired following the game the footage used was from the TBS feed. They showed replays from four cameras, one down each foul line, and three different views from behind home plate. The views of the slide were good, one shot even shows home plate umpire Tim McClelland still moving into position as Holliday attempts to touch the plate.
The next day another Sportscenter show aired that again used the TBS footage, but with only two angles shown, and more importantly with the framing altered so that less of the slide could be seen. Compare the shots contained in the image below.
What makes the change in framing of the replay shots curious is that they were used in a segment where the three ESPN analysts were specifically addressing the question of whether or not Matt Holliday touched the plate. You can’t see Tim McClelland still moving as the play was happening. You can’t see see the on deck hitter Brad Hawpe’s lack of celebration as he watches the play. You can’t see how far Holliday’s body moves away from the third base line as he tries do dive around the tag. After the abbreviated and altered shots were shown, Tim Kurkjian dismissed the issue by saying, “I don’t think he touched the plate either, but its inconclusive.” Really? Well it seems to me that if you are going to address the question of if Matt Holliday touched the plate, that it might be a good idea to use the best replays possible. If you’re ESPN and you’re going to tell your viewers that the replays are “inconclusive” it just doesn’t make sense to use fewer replay angles and then alter the framing of the replays you do show so much that you actually cut out the plate during the tag. In fact, I would argue that that you should make an extra effort to find the best replays and perform your best analysis possible, not to just throw some inferior clips out there and then label them “inconclusive.”
It is an indisputable fact ESPN altered the replay clips of Holliday’s slide so that they showed less detail the day after the game than they did post game. The real question is why did they do it? Here are the best possible answers that I can come up with,
- They felt the new shots were actually better than the first set and showed the play more clearly.
- They wanted to get rid of the MLB/TBS logo.
- They were trying to purposely shape the story so that the replays would be considered inconclusive.
- ?
If it was choice #1, ESPN was sadly mistaken and did not exercise due journalistic diligence. If it was choice #2, ESPN is guilty of making a choice that resulted in the footage not being attributed to MLB/TBS. If it was choice #3, however, well that’s just plain bad and opens up a whole host of shady issues. Issues like, Why are they changing the clips? Who told them to change the clips? etc. I threw in #4 because there could be other reasons so you can lump them all in here.
Just so you can see the original ESPN clips, I’ve placed links to them below as well as an embedded YouTube link to where I have extracted just the replays from both Sportscenters and compare them directly.
Post game ESPN Sportscenter clip
Next day ESPN Sportscenter clip
This is not the only post-game editing that happened!
I did not see the game live, so I was eagerly awaiting the replays to be posted to mlb.com, which they were by 10:53pm PDT Monday night …
AND, as documented in this blog comment string …
http://ducksnorts.com/blog/2007/10/reality-youre-soaking-in-it.html#comments
… as of 12:16pm on Tuesday, October 2nd, the video of this play at mlb.com had changed! It had some weird audio dub’ing which purported to “explain” what the ump was thinking … but it didn’t make sense to me … so I was asking this blog community to go check it out and let me know what they thought of this …
BUT … by 12:36pm, according to blog commenter Clayton, the video with the dub’d audio had been removed, which I verified for myself at 12:40pm.
VERY FISHY!!!
Does nobody remember the home run hit by i believe it was brad hawpe, that was called not a home run… so don’t go bitching about that when the game never should have gone into extra innings if they would not have screwed up the first call. and espn don’t care about any teams west of about new jersey, so its no bias.
It was re-edited to cut out the TBS logo in the lower right hand corner. I hate to ruin your conspiracy theory, but all networks do this to other networks broadcasts. I’ve been in television for 23 years.
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ADMIN’s response:
stapler,
Thank you for the constructive and informative response. I believe I mentioned that deliberate cropping was a possibility here. Still, I think it is still appropriate to criticize ESPN for saying the the “replays were inconclusive” while showing replays that had been cropped so much that the plate disappears from view.