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People and Pop Culture

A Day In The Life With SNY Senior Coordinating Producer Gregg Picker

GREGG PICKER has been the senior coordinating producer for Mets games at SNY for 14 years and heads a team that at times seems like a family. Picker made it clear that hiring the right people and trusting them to do their jobs was a key element to his own success with SNY. A long season can wear some people thin, but keeping things loose helps Picker and the SNY production crew stay creative. Picker took time out before a night game to give THE DAILY some insight into his routine.

8:30am: I get up and look at the morning clips the Mets send out. It’s a way to make sure we feel educated about what’s going on with the team and what’s going on in the baseball world and thinking of ideas for tonight’s broadcast.

10:30am: I’ll inevitably go to the gym or play tennis for a couple of hours and then get something to eat. I like to tell people the lifestyle feels very similar to the lifestyle of a college student. There aren’t a whole lot of days where you have to set an alarm. There are a lot of very, very long nights when we’re covering a game or traveling.

12:00pm: While I eat lunch, I’ll do some stuff preparing for that night’s game, whether it’s jotting down ideas I’ve thought of or the ideas that other guys on the production crew have thought of. If I feel there is something substantial enough that will benefit from advance notice, I’ll shoot an email or a quick text before heading to the ballpark.

3:30pm: On the way to the ballpark I may call our sideline reporter STEVE GELBS to bounce some ideas off of him. I’ll also make calls to give people a heads up about guests in the booth. I may get to the ballpark a little later than some other producers get there, but the reason we can get there between 3:00 and 3:30 for home games is we’re working with the same group of people. There’s a real understanding of what everyone’s doing and what everyone needs to do, so you don’t have to get there at 1:00 for a 7:00 game.

Picker (c) meets with the announcers in the booth before having dinner with them to talk about the showSNY

5:00pm: I’ll go hang out with the announcers in the booth for a while and then we’ll go to the media dining area and have a bite to eat. It’s in that time when we’ll talk about that night’s show. For us, we spend very little time talking about the show open. I would much rather spend the hour with them talking about thematic things we will cover in the game. We’ll discuss matchups that we want to hone in on, and we’ll talk about things we want to include. We talk a lot about what’s going on in baseball, the state of the game. Those discussions lead to creative ideas that we implement down the road somewhere.

6:30pm: I’ll go back down to the truck about 30 minutes before we get on the air. I’ll let the graphics AP know if there’s a specific graphic we need for the open, based on the discussion I just had with the announcers. We take a lot of pride in covering a game the best we can. We try to find one or two extraordinary things to do during the broadcast, that’s our goal. So if everyone else during the day is covering a particular item, we want to do it a different way. We want to give it more depth; we want to find an angle that has not been broached. We’re not interested in regurgitating what everyone else has done.

9:45pm: I leave the truck about 10 minutes after the game is over. We disperse fairly quickly. As I drive home, it’s kind of a peaceful time to think about how I felt the broadcast went that night. It’s a chance to blast the music, open the windows and start to give some thought -- based on how the game went -- on what we can do that’s compelling on the production side for the next day. I’ll get some ideas and come home and talk to my two sons. Sometimes they’ll have great ideas.

11:15pm: Generally, what I do when I get home is stuff my face with some food. If my sons are around I’ll hang out with them and my wife. We’ll watch some TV, it could be sports, it could be a "Seinfeld." Or I could just read the paper. It’s just some downtime before heading to bed around 1:00am.

Know of someone who should be featured in "A Day in the Life"? Send a note to mchupita@sportsbusinessdaily.com.

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