ADVERTISEMENT A Summer Catch: How the Women’s Pro Baseball League Built a Broadcast Plan From Scratch…In Just Six Months By: Brandon Costa, Director of Digital • Posted on: September 16, 2026 • 11 minute read ADVERTISEMENT With a full crew on site in Springfield, deep access to players, and a growing data infrastructure, the inaugural league has spent its first season building a broadcast — and an audience — from scratch. The first time Amanda Smerage took the shot from an RF camera following a player through a celebration tunnel through the dugout after a home run, it felt like more than a good broadcast moment. It was the culmination of months of work and a visceral example of what the Women’s Pro Baseball League could be. “I thought that was really exciting,” Smerage recalls. “The players are bought in on this as well.” Smerage, who has sat in the director’s chair for every game of the historic first season of the WPBL, and producer Paul Aspan have been wrestling with questions that extended well beyond camera placement: What should a professional baseball broadcast look and feel like when the league itself has no history? Cameras were part of the answer, but so was buy-in — from investors, viewers, and, critically, the players themselves. That shot through the tunnel made those possibilities tangible. Players were willing to open the doors, literally and figuratively, and allow the television operation to come along for the ride. At the front bench of a Women’s Pro Baseball League broadcast. At the back is WPBL Executive Producer and Head of Broadcast Mike Rotman. Director Amanda Smerage (center seated) works alongside producer Paul Aspan (right). (Photos Courtesy of Mike Rotman) That relationship between sport and broadcast has been critical during a historic summer in Springfield, IL, where the WPBL has staged its entire inaugural season at Robin Roberts Stadium in an almost bubble-like environment reminiscent of the COVID era. The four-team league — featuring the San Francisco Firebells, New York Heights, Los Angeles Queens, and Boston Hunters — opened play on Aug. 1 and completed a 30-game regular season. ESPN acquired U.S. media rights shortly before Opening Day, streaming the league-produced games on the ESPN App, with select games airing on Scripps Network, and all games streaming live for free internationally on YouTube. However, the league would be producing the games themselves. Now, the experiment reaches its biggest stage as San Francisco meets Los Angeles in the best-of-five WPBL Championship Series beginning Wednesday night. A Production Quality Worthy of the Occasion Mike Rotman didn’t initially sign up to run a sports broadcast. A longtime Emmy-nominated television producer, director, and entertainment executive, Rotman became involved with the WPBL as an investor before being pulled deeper into its content and social-media operation. Eventually, the league asked whether he could handle the broadcasts of the games. By February and March, the original concept was a modest one: a handful of robotic cameras. Rotman balked. “If I’m going to head up broadcast, I refuse to do that,” says Rotman, who is now the WPBL’s Executive Producer and Head of Broadcast. “We’re telling a story. We can’t do that with robocams.” WPBL’s Mike Rotman with on-air analyst AJ Andrews and production consultant Philip Nelson. The challenge was formidable. Streaming production industry veteran Philip Nelson came aboard to help as a consulting producer and the league hired Mark Fratto ‘s production company Linacre Media as its facilities provider . Only a matter of months were left to assemble a production operation for an entirely new professional sports property. There were also budget realities. A REMI model offered an obvious path to keeping costs down, but the group deliberately went the other way for Year 1. “REMI is the most cost-effective way to do it,” Nelson says, “but because of Mike’s focus and the league’s need to tell the stories and be able to pivot on stories, it was critical that we have our entire team on-prem for the season.” Rotman also pushed for continuity. Rather than cycle producers, directors, and other personnel through Springfield as schedules permitted, he wanted a core team that would learn the players and league along with the audience. Smerage and Aspan became the creative front bench and remained embedded for the season. Smerage estimates roughly 85% of the crew has remained consistent day after day despite August and September being among the busiest stretches on the sports-production calendar. Additionally, that storytelling effort has extended well beyond the live game broadcast. The WPBL’s core social-content team of Social Media Director Nathanael de Boer , video editor Amanda Holland , graphic designer Mollie Shafer-Schweig , and writer Sue Kolinsky has worked alongside the broadcast operation throughout the season to introduce players, build personalities, and carry storylines across platforms. The league has also worked with a rotating group of photographers, videographers, and content creators throughout its inaugural season, including Jackie Kalafut , Holly Desautels , Kat Miranda , Elly Maier , Ashley Beal , Jory Nichols , Schuyler Meyer , Ian Hall , Lisa Pride , and Jack Stankey . Seven Cameras: Making Every One Count The objective was not to build an oversized show. It was to identify the essential ingredients of a professional baseball telecast and deploy them wisely. Working with Digital Impact Video, the WPBL crew surveyed Robin Roberts Stadium and settled on a seven-camera complement: the traditional five foundational baseball positions, a tight center-field camera, and the RF unit that has become one of the production’s most important storytelling tools. Box lenses are deployed where possible, with hard cameras covering the familiar first-base, third-base, high-home, and center-field looks. A WPBL broadcast features seven cameras, including an on-field RF camera on a gimbal with access to the field and dugouts at select times. This unit is built around a Sony FX30 and is run by operator Justin Cummens. The core production toolset includes a Ross Carbonite switcher and XPression graphics along with Vizrt 3Play replay. The show also incorporates real-time statistical data and approximately seven microphones around the ballpark to bring the crack of the bat and texture of the stadium into the telecast. “I think anybody can take 30 cameras and find a good show,” says Nelson. “But when you have seven cameras, and you have to be smart with every cut and every direction, that’s where I think true talent rises.” The physical setting has presented its own challenges. Robin Roberts Stadium is more than a century old and was hardly turnkey for a national sports-production operation. According to Smerage, the venue lacked existing broadcast cable runs and dedicated camera platforms, and even finding an ideal high-home position required some creativity. Nate Syznal and Digital Impact Video built out a dedicated network connecting the building, press box, and truck. That network has become the backbone for both production and an increasingly sophisticated data operation. Truck EIC Logan Ozdyck , replay operator Bill “Flash” Nahlik , and graphics operator James Hennings have been among the consistent technical personnel on every show. Access Becomes the Broadcast’s Superpower Where the WPBL cannot match a major-league production in sheer scale, it has leaned into something much harder for established properties to replicate: access. Players and managers routinely join the booth during games. The RF camera operates in and around the dugout. Fans become characters. The production monitors online conversation for storylines that are beginning to resonate. Even the announcing configuration evolved during the season. The telecast began with a more conventional play-by-play, analyst, and sideline setup. It eventually shifted to play-by-play voice Jenna Becerra in the booth and AJ Andrews roaming the stadium while simultaneously serving as analyst, interviewer, and conduit to the players and crowd. That opened a valuable extra seat in the small press box for players and managers to join Becerra during games, giving viewers direct access to participants who may have played earlier that day or are preparing to play the next game. The production needs that flexibility because its audience is developing along with the league. “We have fans that, if you go on Reddit, are already doing massive stats that you’d see in baseball — really stat heads — and then we have people going, ‘What’s a grand slam?’” Rotman says. “We’re hitting very beginner and then we’re hitting very advanced at the same time.” Some of the most memorable characters haven’t been on the field at all. Cameras have found signs from fans who drove more than 1,000 miles to Springfield. Fans have arrived from across the United States and from overseas. A plastic lawn goose dressed in team gear — dubbed Gladys — became enough of an online phenomenon that the production began intentionally working it into both the television show and in-stadium presentation. Smerage has seen the same community form away from the stadium: fans coordinating travel, swapping giveaways, and even offering lodging to one another. “Our fans haven’t necessarily decided that they’re San Francisco Firebells or New York Heights fans,” she says. “They’re a fan of the women playing the sport.” Building a Data Operation From 0-for-0 Launching a league also creates a problem familiar to any producer looking for statistical context: on Opening Day, everyone is 0-for-0. That has changed dramatically as the summer has progressed. TrackMan provides pitch speed, trajectories, and other tracking data, while Presto feeds additional scoring and statistical information through the stadium’s new network. Carly Mitchell, the WPBL’s Assistant to the Commissioner , has taken that information even further, building an internal analytics tool that gives the production access to hard-hit data, spray charts, heat maps, and other visualizations similar to the information fans have become accustomed to seeing on Baseball Savant. Aspan now has enough history to build pitcher-vs.-hitter storylines, show damage zones, identify hard-hit leaders, and treat late-game at-bats with the statistical context expected of a mature baseball broadcast. There have been lessons as well. The production initially hoped Presto could automatically drive portions of the scorebug, but latency proved problematic. For the postseason, a dedicated operator has taken over scorebug management. More Than Just Another Show For the crew that has spent the summer in Springfield, however, the significance of the assignment extends well beyond launching a new television production. The WPBL is the first professional women’s baseball league in the United States since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League disbanded in 1954. More than 70 years later, an entire generation of women is getting something that simply did not exist for those who came before them: a professional baseball league to aspire to play in — and a national broadcast platform on which to be seen. Director Amanda Smerage and producer Paul Aspan at Robon Roberts Field, the season-long home of the inaugural season of the WPBL. For Smerage, whose résumé includes extensive work across women’s sports, including the PWHL and NWSL, that made the opportunity difficult to pass up. “I think it’s important to have the representation across not just the athletes, but the technicians that are doing the broadcast and at all levels of that,” she says. “So for me, it was really easy: there’s a women’s pro baseball league — how do I become involved with this?” That sense of purpose has manifested itself across the production crew. Many have committed their entire late summer to Springfield, returning game after game and learning the league, its players, and its emerging storylines together. For Aspan, the project has also offered an opportunity to reconnect with the sport that first drew him in. “Baseball was always my first love,” he says. “This very much got back to just the love of the game and telling great stories.” Raising the Show for the Championship The postseason has brought another round of upgrades. The WPBL has added a full-time shader as changing daylight conditions become more significant in September, introduced postseason-specific opens, transitions, and graphics, and increased the amount of TrackMan information available to viewers. The fundamental philosophy, however, won’t change Wednesday night. The production team have spent nearly two months in Springfield discovering what the league looks like, what its players sound like, what its fans respond to, and how seven cameras can make a brand-new sports property feel established without sanding away what makes it different. That matters to Rotman because the ultimate objective was never to build a television show around the novelty of women playing professional baseball. It was to build a good baseball broadcast. “These are real athletes,” he says. “The players, they’ve been training their whole life for this. They put in so much work into this. They’re so athletic. The games are so great that we as a team want to make sure we’re capturing that and honoring what they’re doing, which is baseball.” Sharing Upcoming Events Top Stories Inside ESPN's US Open Effort: Embracing the Cloud and a New 20,000 Sq. Ft. 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