People and process behind TWIB

Hi there - Jeff Scott here - with a little inside info on This Week In Baseball as we begin our 31st season. It's an all male staff of producers this year - at least so far - and that is certainly more a coincidence than by design. A couple of years ago Meredith Eckert was our lead producer and she was great - but then she had a beautiful baby boy named Kai and she went away. Last year, Allison Potocki co-produced the show with her husband James and she was awesome - but then she had a beautiful baby boy named Alex - and she went away. Many of our best pieces these last few years have been produced by Kristen Snyder - who was wonderful - but then she had a baby boy which, strangely enough, she also named Alex - and she went away. So it's by attrition - rather than decision - that we open the year with a bunch of guys cutting the pieces. The good news is that all of these fabulous females have either returned to work or will by the all-star break - and the TWIB staff always changes as the year goes by anyway -- so this impromptu boys club will soon go away.

Chelsea Market, home of MLB Productions and MLB Advanced Media (Jay Burke/MLB.com)

My goal here will be to provide you with an inside look at the people and the process behind TWIB - some of which you might even find interesting. For instance, we create the show on the fifth and sixth floors of The Chelsea Market, which is located in the way too trendy Meatpacking District of Manhattan. The building is enormous - stretching from Ninth to Tenth Avenues and from 15th to 16th street. It began as the first Nabisco factory and produced the very first Oreo cookie. Now it is home to myriad businesses, shops and cafes - many law enforcement operations - New York 1 - The Food Network - MLB Advanced Media - and us, Major League Baseball Productions.

The composition of the show is done entirely in this building (other than the field shoots of course). Most producers start cutting their pieces on Monday and we finish the video portion of the show by Thursday night. Friday morning we record our narrator, Buzz Brainard, by ISDN line (he lives in L.A. - more on Buzz and his comfy studio at a later date) - and spend the rest of the day mixing the sound and applying all the finishing touches to the video (fonts, dates, color correction, etc.) By 6 PM the show is beamed up into space and on Saturday it appears on your local Fox affiliate. And then we do it all again.

I'll get a bit more detailed in future weeks but that's the gist of the making of TWIB. So tune in on Saturday and let us know what you think by sending a TWIB note of your own to twib@mlb.com. Thanks.