On April 30, ESPN Senior Coordinating Producer Phil Orlins learned the net had secured rights to the Korea Baseball Organization and that broadcasts would begin May 5, challenging the crew to figure out how to remotely broadcast games on the other side of the globe in less than a week. On the most-recent episode of “SBJ Unpacks: The Road Ahead,” Orlins told our Andrew Levin that the broadcast team was able to pull it off by using ideas the network was kicking around in order to bring back shows like “The Jump” and “Around the Horn.” Orlins also breaks down how the KBO helped ESPN in future broadcasts, viewership numbers and ESPN's future plans for the league -- which concluded its 2020 season this morning by crowning the NC Dinos as champion.
On what lessons ESPN has taken from KBO broadcasts:
Orlins: The biggest thing was that it launched the live-from-home workflow for our commentators, and that workflow trickled. The sports that were in bubbles, like NBA, were a little bit different … but for the sports like MLB, college football, the necessity to make it work with announcers from home was essential. We did our MLB coverage with just about all of our analysts from home. College football has done a tremendous amount, I think the vast majority, of commentary from home. … That aspect just made everything possible.
On assessing KBO viewership:
Orlins: It’s really hard to put a number on it. We get ratings, and we peaked out probably in our absolute highest at a .1, which doesn’t sound like much but is still pretty good. I assess it more through the passionate interest of some gathering of people, people in the baseball culture to a degree. I take pretty seriously the social traffic that goes with it, and we made a real concerted effort that almost anybody who would get up and tweet about it wherever they were, we would try to make at least some effort to at least include a mention of where they are and who they were. I thought one of the really genius moves to connect to people was Eduardo Perez. At some point during the year, he put a pushpin map of the globe behind him. … Every time a tweet came in from outside the U.S. or in an unusual location, he would just put a pushpin on the board and talk about it.
On ESPN’s future plans for KBO:
Orlins: There is continued interest. It is a one-year deal, not surprisingly, so the deal is up with the final game of the KBO Series. There is interest in maintaining it. There are ongoing discussions. We’ll have to see exactly how that turns out. There are no guarantees here, but the fact that it’s in that unusual time slot where we don’t normally have live sports gives us an opening to do something a little different. I don’t think it’s going to move around our ESPN programming plans at that time of day, but we found a pretty good home for it on ESPN2 even when other sports are going, so there’s a decent chance we bring it back if everything works out.
