Greenwich man named to sports hall of fame
Anyone who has watched televised professional sports over the last 46 years, has seen John Filippelli’s work.
Some of it may have been loved, some disliked (at least to start) and much of it was probably barely noticed by the average fan, but there is no question the way fans view games has changed due to Filippelli.
For all his accomplishments and innovations in 46 years of producing sporting events from the World Series to the Olympics and nearly everything in between, Filippelli was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame during a ceremony in New York City on Dec. 14.
He was told he was going to be honored in August of 2020 but the ceremony was delayed over a year due to COVID-19.
“I got very reflective receiving an award like this when I started looking back at nearly 50 years in the business,” Filippelli said. “I lived through almost all the changes from watching TV with rabbit ears to cable and now streaming. The lineage is fascinating and along the way I worked with so many legends I could sit here all day listing names. It is great to be enshrined with all the greats in our industry.”
Filippelli, who has lived in Greenwich with his wife Gina and two sons for 40 years, held top producing jobs at ABC, NBC, the MLB Network and FOX Sports before joining the YES Network as its first employee in September 2001.
At YES, he was tasked with starting an entire network centered around one baseball team and building all the on-air elements of a television network just five months before its March 2002 launch.
“I had nothing but ideas on a napkin. The miracle of all of this was that I was hired on Sept. 10, 2001. Against that backdrop, we had to launch a 24/7 network and had to figure out how to get people to watch,” Filippelli said. “I’d say we did that because 20 years later, we are still successful. YES is a juggernaut and has been on top since it started.”
While Filippelli will say it is a team effort, he is responsible for every aspect of the critically acclaimed on-air content for the YES Network and has earned more than 100 national Emmy nominations as well as more than 100 local Emmy nominations (YES has 571 Emmy nominations, along with 134 Emmy wins, under his watch).
It all started with that napkin and a meeting with then Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
“George wanted YES to be the gold standard. That was going to be tough in five months but he challenged me to be better every day,” Filippelli said. “We started with four cameras and four tape machines and I told George that was not going to be enough. We had to bring postseason type coverage to regular season games. We did that and were a success from the beginning. We changed the sensibility of local broadcasts.”
Of course, they would have to find programming for all the hours and days the Yankees did not have games.
Filippelli came up with a long form interview show in Center Stage and a documentary series he would call Yankeeography.
Still there were hours of empty timeslots on the docket when Steinbrenner presented an idea to Filippelli that YES should hire Mike Francesa and Christopher Russo of Mike and the Mad Dog to simulcast their radio show on the network.
Prior to that, the only radio show being simulcast on TV was “Imus in the Morning.” No sports talk radio shows were on television.
“That gave us five and half hours of programming we needed to fill the schedule. George said ‘get me those two guys on the radio in the afternoon,’” Filippelli said. “We didn’t just want white noise on all day, we wanted something people would come back and watch every day. That really helped us build a 24/7 network around a baseball team. Now, every sports channel simulcasts radio shows, but we did it first.”
From the start at YES, Filippelli had the network at the forefront of sports production and technology. YES was the first television network to produce 3D and interactive MLB telecasts, and was the first television network to display continuous on-screen pitch counts during baseball telecasts. YES was among the first channels to offer a HD channel when it launched YESHD as a 24/7 HD channel in 2007.
Long before he came to YES, Filippelli was implementing change to sports broadcasts.Changes that most take for granted now, but at the time were revolutionary.
Filippelli was responsible for a number of industry firsts while working at FOX, such as being the first producer to utilize regularspeed instant replay, score bugs on the screen, microphones on the bases, shots of fans in the stands enraptured by the game and close-up camera shots of bases, cleats and gloves.
Everything he was doing he said was meant to make fans feel like part of the game.
“We wanted to be different and change everything and FOX gave me a lot of leeway to try new things,” Filippelli said. “We brought fans closer to the game and pioneered a lot of stuff. We put more emphasis on sound because we wanted to hear the game better to draw fans in.”
His time at FOX changed how people watch sports.
“They trusted me and I trusted them,” Filippelli said. “Some of the stuff sounded off the wall, but when it works, it works. You have to have courage in your convictions. When we put boxes over the strike zone, people were furious but over time it becomes secondary and now if it wasn’t there people would ask ‘where is the strike zone box?’ When we introduced real-speed replay, Bob Brenly (FOX color commentator) didn’t say we were doing this new thing, we just started using it.”
Filippelli said the key to introducing new technology to fans was to do it in increments and without fanfare.
“We did it subtly, and rolled it out slowly, and most of what we tried, worked,” Filippelli said. “We didn’t always know what we had but we tried it. When we first started doing shots of fans in the stands people working with us questioned it, but I knew it added drama and tension to the broadcast of the game.”
Filippelli also produced award-winning work while holding senior positions at NBC Sports, ABC Sports, FOX Sports and MLB Network.
He produced many of the most watch events in sports such as the Olympic Games, World Series and MLB All-Star Games, Super Bowls, Monday Night Football, the Indianapolis 500, Wimbledon, NHL games, the PGA Tour, British Open golf, the BCS College Football Championship Series, ABC’s Wide World of Sports and much more.
During his nearly 20 years at NBC Sports, he climbed the ranks to become a lead producer for numerous MLB Game of the Week telecasts, as well as for multiple League Championship Series, AllStar Games and World Series broadcasts.
The memories are almost too many to sift through and picking a favorite is nearly impossible, but the 1988 World Series stands out to Filippelli, who said he loves baseball above all the other sports.
His love of baseball was born in the bar his father owned across the street from Ebbett’s Field in Brooklyn and has never waned.
While at FOX Sports, he produced the 1998 game in which Mark McGwire hit his record-breaking 62nd home run of the season. He was also the coordinating producer for FOX Sports’ first World Series (YankeesBraves in 1996). That World Series saw the first realspeed replay used and really brought to life when Joe Girardi legged out a triple in Game 6.
He said the full-speed replay allowed fans to see the reality of the play and speed of the game unlike slow-motion replays.
His first job was as a vendor at Yankee Stadium at age 16.
In 1974 when taking a tour of NBC Studios in New York, Filippelli was sucked in by the power of television and snuck off the tour and started popping into offices looking for a job.
He finally got a job as a copy boy at NBC making $14 a day and began to work his way up.
When he got a chance to sit down with Chet Simmons, the president of NBC Sports, Simmons challenged the young Filippelli to name the starting lineup of the 1961 Yankees. Instead, he named the whole roster, impressing Simmons.
From there, his legendary career was launched and is still going strong.