Sports

Sports Graphics Roundup Part II: Baseball and Other Things

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We’re on Day 12 of the ESPN BottomLine Watch, and last I checked the BottomLine was still in its old ways. I wonder if anyone has a specific time that the BottomLine reverted to its old ways last Monday the 6th – I’d like to keep a running count.

One reason I didn’t like being cut short on my last post was that I still had one graphical matter yet to be taken care of, and it related to ESPN, which has introduced a new NASCAR banner. I had thought the inspiration was Fox’s NASCAR banner, but now I suspect the real inspiration was an attempt to get a headstart on making the new banner take after MNF.

The main problem I have with it came to me while I was watching the above race live, and it’s the real reason I think this is an attempt to go MNF style: when showing stats like intervals behind the leader, those stats are not shown on a separate line below the scroll, but actually incorporated into the scroll itself, so you might see (for the sake of example) 5. (88) EARNHARDT JR.  -1.24, instead of the “-1.24” being on a separate line. “RUNNING ORDER” is also replaced with “INTERVALS” for this purpose, and the leader just lacks an interval, meaning at the start of the scroll the lengths each driver gets vary WIDELY. I prefer at least the appearance of each driver getting the same amount of space on the scroll. But because of the amount of information that needs to be presented, I can see how it might be difficult to properly convert the NASCAR strip for the MNF-inspired hub. Still, here’s a mockup I made; other than being larger than the real thing probably would be, and the rather stunning paucity of driver logos online in any context, and the fact I probably still don’t have the exact fonts, I think it came out well enough I’d be surprised not to see ESPN adopt a variant of this, to the extent I may have gotten myself AND ESPN in legal trouble at some point down the road.

On to baseball, and we start on the national level, with a move with an impact on other sports. In something of a surprise, Fox has adopted the new FSN score bug for baseball broadcasts – a score bug I had thought was intended to match Fox’s own new graphics. In that sense it’s something of a throwback, both to the era when Fox used boxes and not strips, and to those intermittent times when Fox has made a conscious effort to match the FSN graphics. In a more general sense it’s also a throwback to the era when replacing the count AND number of outs with the pitch speed all at once was the norm.

The dissonance between the amount of space taken up by the count and number of outs, and the amount of space taken up by the inning, makes me wonder why the count and number of outs didn’t get a column to itself. But baseball is probably the hardest sport to create a graphic for, especially one originally designed for another sport, unless you have the simplest of strips, because of the sheer amount of information required – in fact I suspect Fox’s move to this was the result of frustration with how last year’s strip turned out. In this case I suspect taking a cue from FSN’s football and hockey (and soccer) bug was called for; I suspect the lack of use of that for basketball and football points to disillusionment with the new horizontal bug. Again, the fonts and sizes are WAY off in this mockup, and I couldn’t quite get the base display to look right.

MLB Network is on the air as well, but I couldn’t find an embeddable highlight. This will have to make do:

This is what happens when score bug designers don’t have to blend baseball and other-sport priorities. One oddity: Apparently taking a cue from the MNF hub, MLB Network has the bug change to display stats about batters, instead of having a separate graphic at the bottom of the screen, despite the bug being on top. Bit weird, that one.
Comcast SportsNet hasn’t changed its graphics, but its current graphics and logo got its start at SNY, Comcast’s collaboration with the New York Mets, so it may be in for new graphics since SNY has changed its graphics package. Helpfully, SNY provided a mockup for SportsBusiness Journal for an article that was briefly free before the season, so I don’t have to go hunting for a highlight:

The good news is that it adopts a trend I’ve always liked: adding the team logos to the strip. (What I’ve really liked is the logo-only approach once experimented with by Fox on its NFL coverage and now only used by NFL Network, but there’s a reason Fox didn’t stick with it.) The bad news – and it’s not really clear on this thumbnail – is that it’s rather bulky, with large, separated, square elements embedded in a rectangular banner.

What else? We can look at the new graphics for NESN and MASN. So many team-owned RSNs try to get experimental with their graphics and fail. I’m talking to you, SportsTime Ohio. Neither of these two RSNs fell into that trap. MASN only tweaked its graphics and NESN gave them a nice, professional, parallelogram look. (However, I’ve seen evidence that the banner is the only thing NESN changed.)

Back to racing: Versus has an excellent banner for IndyCar races but I’m not finding it on the Web anywhere. We can also confirm that ESPN will whip out its new graphics for coverage of the NFL Draft, complete with the new BottomLine, but since the Draft ticker is handled differently than the BottomLine proper I don’t read anything into this other than the new BottomLine hasn’t been abandoned entirely, which makes it all the more frustrating it’s taking so long to come back in full.

Sports Graphics Roundup Part I: ESPN

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I’ve been anticipating a potential update of ESPN’s game graphics to coincide with the debut of a new graphics package for SportsCenter – if not for that, at least in anticipation of picking up the BCS and in case they want to pick up March Madness. ESPN’s graphics have started to feel almost painfully generic, and an update – perhaps one that would adopt the recently-popular convention of putting each team’s name or abbreviation on a background with the team’s respective color – was much needed.

The current package, which started getting phased in with MNF and the NBA in 2006, was desperately needed to keep ABC sports broadcasts from looking like cable games. It was very spiffy in its day, and until ESPN updated SportsCenter’s graphics it was far spiffier than the studio show graphics that (except for GMC NBA Countdown on ABC) remained unchanged. Look at any ABC college football broadcast from 2006 to see how necessary it was. But it now looks behind the times.

Here’s a mockup I did of what a new package might have looked like for March Madness. These aren’t the exact fonts I envisioned – Arial Narrow and Calibri are the closest I have on my laptop – and I don’t have anything more advanced than PowerPoint for spiffier effects, but you get the idea. It looks pretty close to what I had in mind, with perhaps some scaffolding on the sides and clearer borders between elements, popping in with a flash of light and color, and all looking very elegant.

What ESPN actually came up with, as debuting on NBA broadcasts this week,was somewhat similar to what I had in mind… but I sure as hell wasn’t anticipating basically a straight rip of the MNF graphics, complete with “all information in the bottom space” gimmick. Especially given the new graphics ESPN had introduced for tennis, which was my main inspiration for the above.

There are two major differences with the MNF graphics that work to its detriment; while they may serve to mark MNF’s version as the strip ESPN wants to make feel special (see the “orb” of 2006-07), they also serve to make it look like crap. First, rather than reserve the entire bottom of the screen for graphics, ESPN is throwing all graphics, including its score banner, into a simple rectangle, which merely changes its size as various elements pop in and out. It looks less elegant when it has to stand alone. But perhaps more importantly – and comprehensible for other sports but less so for the NBA, which lacks a BottomLine unless it’s bumped to the Deuce – the bottom line, the part either reading “NBA Wednesday” or showing stats, does not utilize the space that would be used by the BottomLine. Those two elements combine to make it look like a two-line strip, which makes it look bulkier. The use of what appears to be Arial or Helvetica for the bottom line reading “NBA Wednesday” (a possible holdover from the old strip) doesn’t help.

That mockup I did above? Comes from before the new SportsCenter package debuted. I’d have come up with something very different after I got a good look at the new SportsCenter graphics. Since 2006 ESPN’s game graphics have looked spiffier than its studio show graphics. That relationship may now be reversing. Incidentially, across all its platforms, I wonder what ESPN’s most watched shows are, games or studio shows?

It’ll look relatively nice on ABC, and in some ways it’s a throwback to the strip used in the last year of ABC Sports (remember those atrocious numbers? I think I blocked them out)…

…but I can’t help but think they could have done a lot better. The single method for showing the score going to and coming back from break was needed, but it kinda makes ESPN look cheap. At any rate it’s odd that they would choose the instant of the introduction of the new SportsCenter graphics for the new strip, especially with no other ESPN studio shows, including NBA ones, adopting the new graphics yet; the new NBA graphics not looking anything like the SportsCenter graphics; and the BottomLine’s graphical update lasting all of a morning. Couldn’t they have waited, say, two weeks for the playoffs like they did when they introduced the gold border to the NBA strip? (And counting that border, ABC’s streak of never having the same graphics for the Finals in two consecutive years continues!)

(I may try to watch GMC NBA Countdown on Sunday to see the new graphics in a studio show context…)

While we’re in ESPN-land, it appears Sports Media Watch has been horning in on my turf! SMW has been giving full coverage to the rollout of the new SportsCenter graphics, going so far as to get quotes from ESPN spokesmen. (Bloggers doing actual exclusive reporting, and not just one of the big blogs like Deadspin or Fanhouse either? Shock! Horror!) And SMW has just reported the official explanation for the new BottomLine disappearing: “technical complications”. I guess I can buy that explanation. A few seconds into its existence, on ESPN, the new BottomLine started fritzing out and going into a short loop, then disappeared for a while. It made another disappearing act later as well, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ESPN were fitting it out with new functionality, such as showing the time during ESPN2’s morning shows, “SportsCenter on this other channel” in the same space (I saw “Baseball Tonight on ESPN2” on Monday in fact), various alerts moving into the space such as “BREAKING NEWS”, “PROGRAM ALERT”, or Baseball Tonight’s “TODAY’S SCORES AND HOME RUNS”, or appropriating it for ESPN’s 18/58 updates.

But if all of those were already ready (or in the case of the first, discarded), the BottomLine seemed to be working pretty well aside from occasional glitches, and if they weren’t ready that’s pretty short-sighted. At any rate, why is it taking so long? And how much testing of the BottomLine did they do, anyway?

I’m going to be finding the timetable of rollout of the new graphics very interesting, at any rate. According to the more recent SMW post there’s “no timetable” for rollout of the new game graphics, but based on past experiences I would be surprised if it didn’t hew to the following timetable: baseball no later than the start of next season (both ESPN and FSN have been known to make midseason updates to graphics, ESPN for the c. 2004 update, but on the other hand in 2007 Fox didn’t update its graphics to conform to the new NFL style by then adopted by NASCAR even for the postseason), golf possibly as soon as the US Open but maybe not until the British or even next year, NASCAR and the Indy 500… see Part II, horse racing either this year or next (mayyyybe for the Breeder’s Cup), college sports are more likely to see a rollout sooner than last time given the time frame but the main determining factor may be whether ESPN is pressured to move the BCS to/keep it on ABC after next year (a boy can dream), most other sports next year, soccer maybe never.

It’s getting late, so although I had something more comprehensive in mind, that’ll wait for later.

Miscellaneous Notes on ESPN’s New Graphics

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The death of ESPN2 continues. At least on the SD feed, even the BottomLine is marked as simply “ESPN”. About the only indication that this channel is not ESPN is when programs are promoted as being on ESPN2.

A bit odd seeing the new BottomLine alongside the old graphics on Mike and Mike and First Take on ESPN2. Apparently the new graphics will be starting out on SportsCenter only, and ESPN will effectively have three graphics packages: one for SportsCenter, one for games, and one for other studio shows. (I haven’t seen any studio shows since First Take, though.)

Funny story on the BottomLine. The old BottomLine was changed shortly after its introduction, at least in SD; apparently the first version wasn’t legible enough. For that reason, whenever changing to a new topic, such as from “NFL” to “GOLF”, the BottomLine would show a scroll of four sports – with each pair of sports separated by space enough for another sport.

The new BottomLine is actually designed for the font size it’s using, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem, if at all, compared to the old version – except they found space for a larger, less scrunched font for the sport identifier, and now the sport-switch graphic shows six or so sports. It’s also less utilitarian and square, but it’s not really obvious that it’s a parallelogram.

Though I liked when the old BottomLine would shrink the size of the score in order to show stats, and it looks like that’s not happening anymore…

Here’s the funny part: I only saw the morning SportsCenter with its PTI-style rundown, but I suspect the new main graphics for SportsCenter will attract its own concerns of having too small a font size!

You know this isn’t an April Fool’s joke because it’s an update on a previous post.

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Honestly, I wasn’t planning to have more than the Random Internet Discovery today…

So Awful Announcing has an early look at the new SportsCenter graphics and intro and… it’s basically a modified version of the ESPNEWS graphics. The new intro looks rather spiffy though:

SportsCenter Opening Animation from ESPN Communications on Vimeo.

Neither AA nor ESPN’s press site has “regular” graphics for talking heads and the like, but you really have to see the graphics up close to appreciate them. There’s actually a slight parallelogram look to the Bottom Line, and some sort of beveling effect going on down there as well.

Still intend to get up early on Monday to see it in action.

Okay, I have to check this out.

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Sometime next week, you’re going to get a sports TV graphics roundup and review.

Because SportsCenter is overhauling its graphics package.

I may wake up slightly before 6 AM on Monday just to see it debut. I wonder if this is a sign that SportsCenter and other ESPN programs are (finally) moving to the graphics package that has populated ESPN’s actual sporting events since the debut of MNF on ESPN (and been ubiquitous on them since April 2007)?

Or… is it an entirely new graphics package, and I need to watch baseball’s Opening Night the previous night to see if it makes its “real” debut there?

A funny thing happened on Around the Horn Monday…

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The topic was Tiger’s win at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Bob Ryan opens the discussion by saying it’s his second-best win behind his first win at the Masters! Kevin Blackistone slides it behind only his win at Pebble Beach nine years ago.

Then after Jay speaks, Woody Paige chimes in: hey, remember his last win? The one he won in a 19-hole playoff on one leg at the US Open? And Ryan quickly slides this win below the US Open win and Blackistone claims Woody’s somehow agreeing with him even though he still has only the Masters and 2000 Pebble ahead of this one, not the Open.

It’s still absurd to rank it this high when it’s really a stage-setter for this year’s Masters, though. It’s like after the Super Bowl when it seems like everyone leaps to call it the Greatest Super Bowl Evar(r) every single year.

How odd is it…

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…that the top 16 entries in Yahoo Sports’ Tournament Challenge ALL have North Carolina winning it all? I should have picked UConn so I could beat them all. I still wouldn’t place first, but still.

And how bizarre is it that, in a year in which I picked almost at random, I’m in the ninety-seventh percentile of Yahoo rankings? Or that even with that, I’m still not in the top 65,000? That means they got something like over two million entries, and they’re not ESPN. Ouch.

The 2009 Mid-Major Conference

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Refer to this post if you don’t know what this is about or to catch up on the rules.

This year, only three conferences produced multiple bids to the NCAA Tournament: the MWC, A-10, and Horizon League. These conferences are guaranteed one spot each in the Mid-Major Conference.

Three teams reached the Sweet 16, all from different conferences. Of these, Gonzaga and Memphis did not come from a multi-bid conference, while Xavier did. From the Mountain West Conference, neither team won its first round game; from the Horizon League, one team won its first round game while the other did not. Utah and BYU split the season series, but Utah won the conference tournament and BYU, obviously, did not.

This leaves three spots in the MMC to be determined by my discretion, with no conference restrictions.

Without further ado, the eight members of the 2008 Mid-Major Conference:

Memphis (Conference USA)
Gonzaga (West Coast Conference)
Xavier (Atlantic 10)
Cleveland State (Horizon League)
Utah (Mountain West Conference)
Siena (Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference)
Western Kentucky (Sun Belt Conference)
Utah State (Western Athletic Conference)

Davidson and Creighton were the only teams to make the NIT second round from conferences that didn’t qualify teams automatically, and both lost. After being passed over under the Northwestern State rule last year, Siena was a shoo-in for the MMC this year with a seed and first-round tournament win. That left Western Kentucky, which won a first round game, to compete with VCU, Utah State, and Northern Iowa for the remaining spots. Northwestern State rule aside, I decided to push the Hilltoppers through because of their seed, and the remaining spot went to the team I most associated with an at-large bid opportunity.