CHICAGO – The backdrop was glorious: a pastoral midwestern tableau, the setting sun and cornstalks up to the ears. Major League Baseball’s now annual Field of Dreams game was on, but something was missing, and Fox Sports producer Jamie Smurnahyurd had an idea.
Smurnahyurd shared their plan with their cohort of other 20- and 30-something-year-old members of the Fox unit’s remote production team, and all agreed that verisimilitude could best be achieved by a classic historical rendering of what people used to communicate with back in whatever era of time Major League Baseball was trying to capture with the one-off game.
“We saw that there was a lot of baseball stuff – the timeworn gloves, the bloodied cleats and so forth –involved in trying to re-create that moment when Shoeless Joe Jackson emerged from the corn in the movie, but there wasn’t really anything for today’s user verticals to really sink their teeth into and relate to, you know?” Smurnahyurd explained in an exclusive interview with Breaking In Asia. “We thought the best way to really capture that zeitgeist was through a glimpse of technological antiquity so that viewers at home in this era could better relate to the players’ lives back then.”
“I mean, imagine yourself in Dyersville, Iowa, back in the day, right?” they continued. “It wasn’t all just sweet cornpone homilies to baseball and the good life, OK? There were some obvious elements that we felt needed to be in there besides just, ‘Oh yeah, life was so freakin great back then because people had so much free time to do any old shit they wanted to, but the fact is people were, like, just as super busy checking their online fin Dubs and Ls [bank statements] and stuff like that.”
“So pretty much everyone agreed with my idea to subtly stick an early-age Nokia cellphone into the mix with the Griffeys so everyone could see what the old-timers were up against besides being completely unyoked from existential angst related to modern-day workplaces, multiple-partner relationships and insistent pandemics,” Smurnahyurd said.
“In fact, when I called my Mommy with the idea instead of my tiresome 43-year-old boss, she wholeheartedly agreed with me and said she supported me and loved me so so much, and she added that Da-Da also loved me lots but that it wouldn’t precipitate the mother of all anxiety attacks if I could just call them more often to share with them my endless stream of awesomely creative ideas and boundless energy.”
“I think the Cubs won the game in the end, 4-2, and so I super support that,” they added.
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