Watching live sports on TV these days is a delicate balance for broadcasters—how much information is too much?
Sports fans in the 1970s didn’t have to deal with that dilemma, when graphics were so primitive that fans expected “just the facts, ma’am.” Oftentimes, viewers coming upon a baseball game mid-inning would have to wait for the announcer just to get the score.
NESN, the TV home of the Boston Red Sox, decided to have some fun with this scenario, broadcasting part of a game between the BoSox and the Cincinnati Reds this week in the same manner a fan would view it in the mid-’70s.
The occasion was to commemorate one of the most memorable World Series in baseball history (at least to Red Sox fans), when the BoSox lost to the 1975 champion Reds in seven games.
To honor the 50th anniversary, NESN broadcast the third and fourth innings of the July 2 game at Fenway Park using vintage-inspired graphics and scorebug, throwback outfits, immersive flashbacks and other nostalgic broadcast elements. Members of the 1975 BoSox, including Fred Lynn and Dwight Evans, joined the broadcast team of Dave O’Brien, Lou Merloni and Jahmai Webster to reflect on the series.
NESN had been planning the retrocast for months, according to Amy Johnson, coordinating producer for the Red Sox at NESN.
“The idea of doing like a flashback inning came about from one of our producers, who was also a big fan of that ’75 team,” she said. “And so I immediately started watching a lot of YouTube videos. When I mentioned it to our graphics operator and our A1, they were all super on board and excited about it.”
Johnson said the network had to balance the idea of reducing on-screen informational graphics while also giving Sox fans the live coverage they had come to expect.
“We narrowed it down to two innings, and then we had some conversations about how ‘1970s’ we could go while still serving the audience,” she said. “So that's how we ended up with kind of the retro-looking score bug.”
To recreate the lower-grade “look” of a 1975 broadcast, the network had to alter its usually pristine 4K HDR resolution. To do that, they turned to NESN Technical Director Michelle Schlickman.
“She essentially created one version with crushed blacks and pulled out some of the Chroma, and then she keyed that over the same source to create some modulation,” Johnson said. “She was really excited by the challenge and she definitely took it head on, and it came out great.”
The graphics department was fully on board with the concept from the beginning, according to Johnson.
“This was truly a labor of love for our graphics operator; the minute I told him the idea he was all over it,“ she said. ”And then our senior graphics producer, Patrick White, helped us find a font that we had in house that looked similar to what NBC used in 1975 and then Bridget Sheeran, our graphics producer for the Red Sox, was the one who executed, making sure that we had the individual batter fonts updated throughout the innings.”
Social media lit up during the broadcast and the response was almost unanimous: Fans young and old loved the look, with some wishing the move to less graphics (or even none) could be an option going forward. Johnson said that while there are no plans to offer such a graphics-less feed, she sees this desire eventually being fulfilled by technology.
Rewinding to the best of last night’s ’75 retro-cast 📽️ pic.twitter.com/tv1IYEl1r1July 2, 2025
“I do think all media consumption is continuing to evolve toward personalization and people being able to choose what is on their screen for a broadcast,” she said. “We don't have any plans to do anything like that, but you can kind of see that down the road.”
Johnson said the broadcast showed how live sports TV can take liberties with new looks and sound to bring new experiences to fans.
“My biggest takeaway is, how can we keep challenging people throughout a baseball season to do some different fun things and kind of push our broadcast to the next level?” she said. “You know, there’s a lot of baseball games and nights to have something like this that's a little bit different.”
That said, Johnson said any experimentation will never distract from NESN’s ultimate goal.
“Our No. 1 priority is always coverage of the game and quality of the game,” she said. “So I felt like we kind of got that happy medium in the look that we went with.”
