Kuiper and Krukow add levity to Giants’ TV broadcasts

How weird is televised baseball in the age of the coronavirus? At the top of Friday night’s Giants-dodgers game in Los Angeles, play-by-play man Duane Kuiper let viewers know that he and on-air partner Mike Krukow had taken social distancing to the extreme.

“We are in San Francisco,” he said, “in our comfortable booths at Oracle Park.”

Welcome to baseball’s new normal — masked men in the dugout, cardboard cut-outs in the stands and TV commentators nowhere in the vicinity of the actual game.

After watching Thursday night’s opener on ESPN, local fans got their first regular-season taste of the “home” broadcast team on NBC Sports Bay Area and it was rather surreal to say the least.

As for the glaring emptiness of Dodger Stadium? The optics weren’t much different from a random Tuesday night A’s-rangers game at the cavernous Oakland

Coliseum. In other words, some of us are accustomed to staring at a depressingly empty ballpark.

But this was Giants-dodgers — a matchup that is supposed to carry some extra sizzle. And the low hum of canned crowd noise just doesn’t didn’t it. (I kept hoping that the person at the audio control board might, at one point, playfully pipe in the sound of crickets).

The cardboard cut-outs, while amusing, just couldn’t drum up much energy. On the other hand, it was fun trying to spot the “celebrities” behind home plate and along the base lines. “Oh look, there’s Mary Hart! … And check out Bryan Cranston!”

Meanwhile, we learned that there are some definite pluses to having flat, two-dimensional faces in the seats. They, for one, aren’t annoyingly on their cell phones all night. And unlike real Dodgers fans, they don’t bolt for the parking lot in the sixth inning.

Even better: No cardboard beach balls made their way onto the field.

It was apparent, however, that the lack of fleshand-blood spectators robbed Kruk and Kuip of one of their most enduring shticks: Providing lighthearted voiceovers on shots of fans and while commenting on the food they’re eating, how they’re dressed, their talent for snagging a foul ball, etc., etc.

NBCSBA commendably attempted to fill the void with occasional “Authentic Fan-cam” segments in which Giants devotees were shown root-root-rooting for their team via virtual Zoom technology from spots throughout the Bay Area and beyond.

“I love that Authentic Fan-cam,” said Krukow, exuding his usual cheeriness. “That is fun.”

It may not continue to be as fun if the Giants keep playing as badly as they have over the first two games. But give the their broadcast team credit for bringing some humor to what has to be a challenging situation. At one point, the camera cut to Oracle Park where Kuiper and Krukow — stationed in adjacent Oracle Park booths — showed off cardboard cut-outs of themselves.

“My shoulders are a little droopy,” Kuiper complained.

And in another segment, they actually provided some play-by-play of the action happening in the yard at 24 Willie Mays Plaza:

“We’re not at Dodger Stadium,” Kuiper reiterated. “If you want to know what’s going on here in this park, the sprinklers have just come on.”

“That’s right,” chimed in Krukow. “The sprinklers here at Oracle Park are in full bloom.”

With a sawed-off schedule of only 60 games and no fans in the seats, you can’t exactly say baseball is in full bloom. But the game is still the game and, after a while, it becomes easier to focus on the action, not the background.

Also, if the robust ratings for ESPN’S Thursday-night opener are any indication, it seems that America’s sportsstarved viewers are ready to embrace baseball in any form.

Now, if only the Giants themselves can make for better television.