Rich Has One (or Two) Suggestions on How to Speed Up MLB’s Home Run Derby

Rich loved the new Home Run Derby. He just cannot help himself when it comes to tinkering, and he came to the show with a short list of fixes for Major League Baseball and Netflix to consider before next year.

He led with the obvious one: the thing ran long. "How do we shave a half an hour off this thing?" he asked. The intros ate up time, and Rich was not going to fault Netflix for swinging big on its first crack at the event, complete with Michael Buffer on the microphone. Buffer, Rich reasoned, is from Philadelphia, and if you put the bag in front of him, he will show up. Still, the runtime got away from everyone.

Then came the stat that made the point better than any complaint could. Rich looked it up: the Philadelphia Phillies had played 20 actual baseball games in that stadium this year in less time than the Home Run Derby took to complete. The event ran roughly two hours and 40-some minutes. Twenty full games, faster than one derby. His proposed remedy was to trim the swings, maybe 15 in the first round and then 10 and 10, so the hitters are not visibly gassed by the end.

The bigger gripe was the broadcast itself. Rich singled out the fan energy, wondering whether it was Hunter Pence screaming all night, and joked that someone should have leaned in and reminded him there were going to be at least 200 more home runs coming. He gave credit where it was due, praising the booth work from Rizzo and Vasgersian and the array of voices Netflix worked in, including Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols.

His real target was the directing. Rich, a self-described die-hard baseball fan of half a century, said he could not tell a home run swing from a flyout swing when the cameras cut to slick hero shots from down low. "Let's take the Scorsese and Fellini out of it," he said. "I need to see the pitch come in and leave the frame." Without the ball entering and exiting the shot, the viewer at home has no idea what is happening, especially in the moments that mattered most, when Wilson Contreras and eventual winner Jordan Walker each had to keep homering to survive.

His fix is simple: give him the shot from behind home plate, or from center field, the way a normal baseball game is presented. He acknowledged the counterargument, that the video-game camera angles cater to the younger demographic Netflix is chasing, the way a kickoff now gets tracked on a sky cam. "Maybe I'm showing my age here," he allowed, comparing his preference to wanting the straight-up view on a football broadcast rather than following a kick across the sky.

There was also a nod to the streaming-era clutter. During Walker's postgame interview, Netflix shrank the moment into the corner and stacked on recommendations for other shows, including Will Ferrell's new series debuting this week. Rich just wanted the Walker interview full screen, with his dad, the way the night deserved. For all the nitpicking, or Netflix-picking as he put it, Rich landed where he started. It was an exciting, dialed-in, great night for baseball. He is only tinkering because it was good enough to be worth improving.