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The best uninterrupted shot of the 2024 baseball season was so long that my GIF maker won’t even let me show it in one clip. It came in the ALDS after a Lane Thomas grand slam. Here’s the start of it:
(If the GIFs don’t load, or load slowly, try the browser view of this post.)
It’s been almost 20 years since we started getting the Home Run Cam, the steadicam shot that jogs along the third-base line with our hero. (First I could find of it was the 2007 postseason.) But ~ 2022 the Home Run Cam took a big leap forward: Instead of running alongside in foul territory, the camera would sometimes position itself in fair territory, looking out. That GIF of Lane Thomas—even if Thomas weren’t in it, it would still be a gorgeous pan of a stadium in bedlam, flying past the exuberant third base coach, the leaping teammates in the dugout, then the emergence of the despondent opposing catcher still in squat, and then a welcome party at home plate, the home crowd in various states of levitation, and then—the best part—the camera’s pirouette at home plate, a full 360 of the stadium, the replay on the big board, “home run” flashing on a 100 digital signboards, the Key Tower looming over left field. Lane Thomas seems to smile at us—but he’s probably smiling at his dugout—and then the camera settles in behind him as he returns to the dugout.
That’s 12 perfect seconds. It’s just the appetizer. Here come the next 15, which were, of course, continuous with the above GIF in the broadcast:
It’s the most jostling baseball shot I think I’ve seen.
***
This is basically the Copacabana shot from Goodfellas, one of the most famous, and most copied, tracking shots in cinema:
The idea is that we’re experiencing this walk from Karen’s point of view, as she’s led underground where Henry is royalty. Her date is greeted along the way by bouncers, friends, kitchen staff, peers, before finally settling in to his front-row table. The follow shot turned one sentence of source material (in the original book) into three minutes of character development.
That shot had to be rehearsed, choreographed, and ultimately performed eight or nine times before it was seamless. The TBS broadcaster who got assigned Lane Thomas had one chance, on his own, and he nailed it.
***
Before the Copa shot, the last big leap forward in Home Run Cams had been the horizontal tracking shot of the dugout celebration, which began to appear around 2016. You know the shot; it’s pretty rad, too:
It’s a good shot, filled with detail and mood, but it’s not perfect. You don’t see most of the teammates’ faces, you don’t spend as long with the faces, and a lot of times the shot gets interrupted by like a butt.
Most importantly, you’re still at a remove. They’re the players, we’re the watchers, and we’re still viewing them from outside.
The Copa shot is a way of closing that divide. It started to show up in the postseason in 2021; the first time I could find a cameraman going down into the dugout1 was after a Manny Machado home run that fall. But that camera was tentative, scared—it dipped a toe down into the dugout but didn’t follow far. As Machado got further from our hand-held camera, the production cut to the stationary camera on the other side of the dugout. (The stationary cameras in the dugout have long let us peer into the players’ world but aren’t nearly the same experience; they can only zoom, not immerse.)
In subsequent postseasons the camera would enter further, but very rarely. This year, though, the shot took off. Of the 98 homers in the 2024 postseason, 14 went down into the dugout for the Copa shot.2 The descent is the single most important part, and the gutsiest, and every Copa shot represents a camera operator taking a chance. It’s not always done perfectly. Sometimes the shot goes down but then backs away
or goes down but cuts away before the player reaches the end of his parade, awkwardly revealing the Steadicam guy on the player’s tail
or, worst, get so, so close to the dugout before the producer peels off:
More commonly, broadcasts just choose the less invasive horizontal tracking shot, which is fine, but does feel a bit twee to me. Or they cut away from the batter as soon as he crosses home plate, to show a replay of the homer. This is, unfortunately, a result of the pitch clock, which starts ticking down 30 seconds as soon as the batter crosses home plate. Some productions prioritize the replays over the celebration. This is a mistake. You can always show a replay later; that’s the essence of a replay. You can only be in the moment once.
**
My second favorite Copa shot this year was of Nick Castellanos, because a) what a steep drop into that dugout!, b) Castellanos provides so much energy on his own, the camera can’t even keep up, and c) something poignant about going from surrounded by teammates to all alone in that last half-second:
By contrast, Lane Thomas doesn’t provide the energy in his own dugout parade—its his teammates who provide it. (See the first player he meets on his way back to the dugout, Brayan Rocchio, winding up for a huge High 10, as Thomas simply places his hands up to receive.) This is part of why he is the perfect follow subject: With Thomas’ face obscured, the camera instead captures the circus around him; by hovering right over his back, we experience it as him. We get to see every teammate’s individual face or pose or celebration almost as though they’re making it directly to us:
Thomas, meanwhile, is shown as a journey through chaos. Four moments stand out to me:
1) The way he straighten up in the few steps before he reaches the dugout, and the camera centers him, and his shoulders seem to grow, and in that moment looks his largest and most determined, a cowboy in a doorway; 2) the helmet throw, sudden and aggressive, just as he’s about to drop into the unhinged chaos below, 3) the way the camera struggles to stay in focus after the descent, the way he and his name blur, as though the noise and shouting is disrupting the signal, and 4) the moment he reaches the end, walks past the last guy, and then suddenly stops and turns back to that last guy, and the look on his face is, for just a brief moment, a guy coming out of a trance.
Then his journey is complete. He turns to the camera and looks straight into it, as if to say,
It’s done.
**
The baseball broadcast used to be about, simply, letting people who couldn’t be at the ballpark follow along. That was stage one.
Stage two, as technology got better, was to make it so that the viewer at home could get a better view of what was happening than you could at the field: The center field camera to show the strike zone, replays, and then eventually freeze-cams, strike zone graphics, pitch types, etc. If you want to analyze a game, the best seat is now arguably at home.
We’re moving into stage three, which is immersing the viewer. When they put a microphone on a player and interview him during the fifth inning, it’s not the answers to the questions that are the draw; it’s the chance that he might suddenly have to chase a fly ball and we’ll get to hear what a ballplayer’s breathing sounds like when he’s on a dead sprint. When they put a camera on an ump’s mask or lapel, it isn’t that it provides a better view (it doesn’t) so much as that it provides a view from inside the play, rather than outside it.
The Copa shot is a small but significant development in stage 3. Putting a camera operator on the field, instead of just outside it; putting a camera into a dugout, rather than above it; both things dramatically change the broadcast, and bring us that much nearer to the participants’ subjectivity. We’re getting slightly closer to answering the question that, as spectators, we want answered more than any other: What’s that like?
Presumably not the actual first time, one rarely finds a definitive first
This seems to be dependent on the production crew. Every Copa shot I could identify came from one of three series: ALCS (CLE/NYY, TBS), ALDS 1 (CLE/DET, TBS) and NLDS 1 (NYM/PHI, Fox).
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More long shots! Great piece!
This is fantastic. Thank you.