Game Creek's World Series truck had six replay operators working from Los Angeles

What one truck pair carried in Milwaukee

The game side had 22 Sony HDC-5500 cameras, including four HDC-5500s at high frame rate with Canon 122xN lenses, plus 11 high-frame-rate sources at 6X and 8X speed: eight HDC-5500s and three Sony HDC-P50s. In Yogi B, Game Creek ran its tape-release workflow through the truck's Suite 2 switcher, and a Calrec Brio console handled the audio submix.

The studio side was smaller. It used four Sony HDC-F5500 cameras fitted with Canon Cine Servo PL-mount lenses in 25-250mm and 11-55mm, plus an RF handheld HDC-5500 and four EVS servers. Game Creek also handled MLB Network's world-feed production, parking GCV Apollo and Edit 2 beside Yogi in Milwaukee.

For a broadcast operations lead sizing a playoff package, these numbers are a useful reference point. They show what a national baseball game asks of one A/B truck pair before the studio show is counted. And the coordination behind them is constant: SVG describes daily conversations with Tom Lynch, FOX Sports' coordinating producer for game and studio.

Replay crews in two cities

The studio show split its replay the same way: four EVS servers, with two operators on site and two in Pico.

The truck's layout helps explain why this works. Replay ran out of Yogi's B unit, and Game Creek has long designed its A/B pairs so the B side behaves as part of the A. In a 2021 case study published by NewscastStudio, Game Creek director of technology Keith Martin described the company's truck-to-truck interface, T2T. Every Game Creek truck built since 2012 has it, and it carries 32x32 video paths over a single cable. Martin wrote that the usual job is shipping all video from the host truck to a B unit, so replay operators and graphics staff can work as if they were sitting in the A unit.

On the game side, there were 15 EVS XT-VIA production servers, with nine operators on site and six operators at FOX Sports' Pico facility in Los Angeles. The studio side ran four EVS servers, with two operators on site and two in Pico. The Milwaukee setup suggests FOX treats Pico as one more room in the A/B arrangement Game Creek built its trucks around.

For networks deciding how many people to send to a tentpole event, the Milwaukee split offers one reference point. It could suit operations where replay runs on network-connected servers. It says nothing about camera or engineering crews.

Booking trucks before the bracket is set

Behind the spec sheet sits a scheduling problem. Before each postseason, Game Creek has to guess which teams will make the playoffs and which buildings will host games. Those answers decide which crews are available and whether a truck is close enough to make the first game. In the Division Series, the company had trucks in three of the four cities.

The other half of the job is travel. "We can't book multiple flights on the same airline," Aaron noted. He described the whole team staying up until 1 a.m. to grab flights, while office staff are lined up in advance so travel approvals can go through. By the start of the Championship Series, he said, the effort has pretty much hit its peak.

Trucks keep getting bigger anyway

Remote replay seats might suggest trucks are shrinking. Game Creek's own build schedule points the other way. In September, SVG reported that Game Creek Video's shop in Hudson, NH had rolled out Countdown, a new truck built to serve ESPN's on-site studio program, Monday Night Countdown. The same shop also gave four existing units significant upgrades: Celtic and Columbia, which work for CBS, and Larkspur and Maverick, which serve ESPN. Jason Taubman, Game Creek's SVP Technology, told SVG that whenever the company believes it has finished a truck too large for any crew to fill, crews end up filling it fairly fast. His response, he said, is to keep making each one as large as the company can.

According to Martin, Game Creek's T2T V2 and V3 interfaces allow Countdown and ESPN's Flagship facility to "share all the comms, video, and audio," which in effect turns the two infrastructures into one. That looks like the 2012 truck-to-truck concept scaled up well beyond its original capacity. ESPN needs that scale: every week it produces more than 10 hours of programming tied to MNF, all from the venue.

Taken together, the World Series compound and the Countdown build suggest remote crews and big trucks grow together. The network moves some people off site, and the truck takes on more sources for them to work with. Nothing in Milwaukee replaced the 95 live sources parked outside the ballpark.

Then there's resolution. FOX's World Series and ESPN's Monday shows both run in 1080p HDR today, even though Countdown was designed to produce a Super Bowl-level show in UHD HDR. How much of that built-in headroom ESPN ends up using will be the next real test of whether production teams catch up with the truck again.