Brewers television broadcaster Brian Anderson used the phrase “keeping the air in the balloon” to describe what it was like to telecast a baseball game for about four hours without the benefit of commercial breaks.
This particular balloon had to hang in the air – and on the air – for about 10 innings without any ads.
On Monday night at Miller Park, the Brewers played the Giants in a 14-inning game that lasted 4 hours 34 minutes. San Francisco won, 4-3.
It must have seemed a lot longer than that to the Fox Sports Wisconsin crew that handled the game because between innings three and 13, there were no commercials. The telecast went from about 7:30 to 11:30 p.m. without them.
Because of a technical problem at a Fox control center in Houston, many of the Fox regional cable outlets were messed up. In Milwaukee it meant the telecast could not go to commercials, so it had to create segments as it went along to serve as breaks between innings.
Full story: Brewers’ TV crew deals with rare species of telecast – commercial free, with extra innings