Best Seat in the House

The best seat in the house was not in Yankee Stadium or in Milwaukee's County Stadium, but in front of any TV set in the land. NBC whisked the home spectator all over the field almost as intimately as the ball itself, perched him right behind the umpire at home plate, let him look over the pitcher's shoulder, or into the dust cloud at third. It was a job that took teamwork as smooth as any on the ballfield. Alertly swung and aimed cameras sent a confusing pell-mell of images from all angles into a control room where split-second decisions distilled the chaos into the crisp, orderly telecasts that brought the World Series to baseball's biggest audience--some 40 million all over the U.S., Canada and, for the first time, "over the horizon" to beisbol-slappy Cuba.

NBC's decision to cover Yankee Stadium with four color cameras made a tough job even tougher. Using six black-and-white cameras in Milwaukee, the same crew achieved more fluent coverage from a greater variety of angles. Though the vast majority of viewers saw even the colorcasts in the black-and-white version, color demanded cameras three times as bulky (and balky), and the engineers had to "paint" constantly with their control knobs to cope with changes in lighting and color temperature. Their pains reproduced some vivid ballpark atmosphere. The grass sometimes turned Kentucky blue and the shaded areas filled with indigo murk, but improved equipment averted the blind shadows that plagued the first (and only previous) color Series in 1955.

Battle Stations. At Yankee Stadium a mile and a half of cable linked the cameras with NBC's color mobile unit in the street outside. Within the curbstone control room, nine shirtsleeved men were wedged into a maze of apparatus like submariners at battle stations, lit by little more than the flicker of eight TV monitoring screens. Director Harry Coyle, 35, an ex-bomber pilot who, like most of the others in the mobile unit, is a veteran of TV's infancy, chain-smoked from his perch on a high stool, his eyes darting back and forth. Crammed in front of him and to his left stood screens flashing four different views of the game, plus a fifth monitor linked to another camera focused on cards bearing players' names. Above this cluster of screens hung two more: one showed the picture that Coyle had just decided to put on home sets; the second, like the batter's on-deck circle, carried whatever shot he could foresee as the next.

Producer Perry Smith, standing behind Coyle, wore two headsets--one connecting him to the Radio City studio where most of the Gillette commercials were fed into home screens, the other into the stadium to a man alongside Announcer Mel Allen, whose voice blatted through the control room above the hum of air conditioners. Smith kept a score card, called out what action possibilities lay in the next play. With two men out in the second inning, Joe Adcock was on second, and Milwaukee Catcher Crandall came up to bat. Smith sang out: "Next man up is the pitcher. They might walk Crandall."

"Take Three," called Coyle. "On Three," echoed Technical Director Walter Serafin into his private line to the cameramen, and he punched a button that put Camera Three on the air. It showed a side view of Crandall in the batter's box, with catcher and umpire behind him.

"Super," Coyle ordered. At this signal, Crandall's name was superimposed along the bottom of the frame. "Stand by on One." Camera One flashed onto the preview monitor with a view of the infield from behind home plate as the pitcher wound up. "Super out," said Coyle; Crandall's name melted away. "Take One," he said, in time to bring viewers the pitch. "If they walk Crandall, Three'll pan with him to first base. If he hits, Three cover the play at first base, and Four stay with the second-base runner." Crandall took a base on balls; so Camera Three leisurely swept along with him to first. But then in the Yankees' half of the same inning the action crackled so furiously that Coyle, working with a surgeon's concentration, called his shots onto the air without time to set them up in the preview monitor.

Cheer & Nightmare. The director seldom gave special orders; each cameraman had been briefed in advance what to cover in almost any eventuality of play. Camera Two, for example, wore telescopic lenses for distant closeups of catches in the outfield. The other three cameras used "zoom" lenses that could pull the viewer right through the air from a wide-angle long shot to a tight closeup.

Like the game itself, TV coverage of the opener was sometimes laggard; the crew failed to keep up with a few of the fast plays that won it for the Yankees, 3-1. Next day, when Milwaukee bounced back 4-2 the Series grew livelier, and so did the TVmen in overcoming some of baseball's trickiest TV hazards: double plays, attempted pick-offs and the vagaries of wrong-field hitters.

But the second game also produced a major TV nightmare. In quick succession, the images from Cameras Three and Four began wavering fitfully during the fifth inning. "Fellows, Three and Four are in trouble," said Serafin into his mouthpiece. "One and Two will have to play it square." Engineers worked to rebalance Camera Four, which had been suffering from sun glare all afternoon, and hunted for a burned-out tube in Camera Three.

Zoom & Pivot. "Two!" snapped Coyle. "Stay with the runner on second, but be ready to go to the outfield. Take Two." The Yanks' Coleman took a lead off second. "Take One." The viewer saw the diamond from behind home plate. "All right, Two, let's try a shot of the pitcher. Take Two." Pitcher Lew Burdette wound up. "Take One." The bat cracked. A grounder scooted to second, and Camera One zoomed closer to show the throw to first that ended the inning. Camera Two sped back to the outfield for a shot of the Scoreboard. "Nice going!" breathed Coyle.

For almost ten minutes, until the technicians got Camera Three working again, Coyle kept the two survivors zooming and pivoting. From its emergency chores in the infield, Camera Two groped repeatedly for urgent outfield closeups; its monitor sometimes became a quivering mound of mixed Jell-o before trembling to a halt on an outfielder poised for a catch, without a second to spare before Coyle threw the picture on the air. But through the whole afternoon, only a single catch eluded the 24 men who toiled to take the Series to the nation. "That's not too bad," said one, "when you consider that the same thing happened to Mickey Mantle today."

Moving west to Milwaukee, Smith, Coyle & Co. got a workout that all but wore out their camera swivels. Through the zoom lens of an extra camera perched in a clump of pine trees behind center field, the TV audience could watch a pitcher, batter, catcher and a runner on second in one glance; sometimes the camera almost stole the catchers' signals. In the third game, 17 hits squirted about the landscape while the Yankees belittled the Braves, 12-3. The ten innings of the fourth game were a drill in aerial photography as four crucial home runs traveled the fences--Hank Aaron's three-runner and Frank Torre's in the fourth; Yankee Elston Howard's two-out, full-count game-tying hit in the ninth, and Eddie Mathews' great big fat one in the tenth. That won it for the Braves, 7 to 5, and bought everyone--ballplayers, umpires, sportswriters and TVmen--a return trip ticket to New York.

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