Lights, Camera, Action ... Mets!

batmagadanleadoff · May 16, 2025

The Movie Nerd Making Mets Games Look Like De Palma Movies

John DeMarsico on going viral for directing baseball broadcasts like they're classic films.

Excerpt:

Every night during the season, the person directing a Major League Baseball broadcast makes thousands of tiny cinematic decisions. With a panoptical array of cameras covering every square inch of the diamond, they soak up all of the details hiding in plain sight. You're already familiar with the touchstones: A tight zoom toward the sweaty brow of a beleaguered pitcher, a wide shot of a leadoff batter's coiled stance, or a sweep across the stands to capture the giddy-drunk fans during the seventh inning stretch. But John DeMarsico, who directs games for the New York Mets, takes it all much further. What if a baseball broadcast could look like Spielberg? Or Coppola? It's not as crazy as it sounds.

Over the past few years, DeMarsico began mixing in homages to the Hollywood canon during those listless evenings battling the Phillies, in the same way Tarantino might weave in a not-so-subtle nod to John Ford during a bloody action sequence. You know it when you see it: Maybe DeMarsico will cut to an overhead shot of Citi Field from the crown of the Statue of Liberty, in a way that evokes Planet of the Apes. Another night, he frames Edwin Díaz's slow trot to the mound like Dorothy's first steps from black and white into the Technicolor world of Oz, or he squares up current Mets manager Carlos Mendoza like Zendaya, simmering from the grandstand in Challengers.* However, DeMarsico's most frequent inspiration might be Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. When angled correctly, a showdown between a batter and a pitcher can look a whole lot like the quickdraw duels in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Read it all at: https://slate.com/culture/2025/05/new-york-mets-baseball-game-broadcast-director-movies.htmlhttps://slate.com/culture/2025/05/new-york-mets-baseball-game-broadcast-director-movies.html

Youtube vid:

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