Apple hits a home run in its first at bat with Friday Night Baseball

What it was like to watch the first ever Major League Baseball games broadcast on Apple TV+.

Sorry, couldn’t resist the cheesy headline! But in all seriousness, I was very much looking forward to this past Friday’s debut of Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV+. How would Apple handle broadcasting duties for live sporting events? How would they put their own unique stamp on the experience? Even if you’re not a baseball fan, I think this topic is of interest given that this is likely the first of many live sports that Apple will eventually carry.

(Note: Apple TV+ didn’t permit taking screenshots during these broadcasts, likely at the behest of Major League Baseball, so the images presented here were photos I took of my TV during the game. The colors are a little off, but frankly I’m pretty pleased with how well these came out given the circumstances. Props to the iPhone 13’s camera quality.)

Apple TV+ has the streaming rights to Friday Night Baseball this season, which means two games every Friday night, exclusive to Apple TV+. For a limited time they’re available for free to anyone, but presumably eventually that door will close and you’ll need to be an Apple TV+ paid subscriber to watch these.

Just one look at that photo and you can tell that all of the on-screen graphics were designed with care by Apple’s design team. The score bug in the upper left corner of the screen looks like an iOS 15 widget. The graphic showing batter Josh Bell’s stats looks like an interface element from one of Apple’s operating systems in Dark Mode. The rounded corners, the transparency, the simple white-text-on-dark-background with Apple’s font. It’s all extremely Apple and I really, really dig it. Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV+ instantly has the best on-screen graphics in sports. I also love the advanced stats shown throughout the game in the bottom right corner. It’s possible other networks do that as well, but I hadn’t seen it before and it’s just a neat little bit of nerdy stats candy to augment the rest of the broadcast experience.

The biggest “TV magic” moment of the debut broadcast occurred in the second game of the night at the top of the 7th inning of the Astros/Angels game. Reporter Heidi Watney was interviewing the parents of Houston rookie Jeremy Peña while Peña was at bat. In the middle of the interview, Peña hit his first ever MLB home run. The broadcast was able to capture the reactions of his beaming parents. You might notice another little Apple flourish in the photo above: Watney is wearing AirPods Max headphones. Nice, Apple.

One thing I was curious about going into the games was, how would Apple handle ad breaks? These baseball games do indeed have traditional commercial breaks with traditional commercials airing with them. And it was boringly no different from commercials you’d see on any other streaming broadcast: they were the same few ads over and over again, and the picture quality of the ads was terrible. I suspect that MLB is completely responsible for the commercials and there’s not much Apple can do about them, but it’s kind of a shame. If I do have to look at commercials, I’d prefer them to be up to the quality standard of the main event’s broadcast.

Speaking of which, Apple has said nothing about 4K or HDR with these games, and there’s nothing on screen to indicate what standards they’re using. You can’t swipe down to see whether the game is in HD or 4K as you can with other Apple TV content. A lot of speculation suggests that not all of the stadiums have 4K HDR broadcast equipment on hand. If so, I hope Apple can help move Major League Baseball forward on that front. Regardless, the picture quality looked amazing, and worrying about 4K and Dolby Vision is a minor, though important, nitpick.

I really don’t have much to say about the quality of the broadcasters. I’ve never been someone who gets bent out of shape over bad in-game commentary, so this didn’t have a high bar to hurdle for me. I’ll leave it to others to comment on that aspect of these games.

On the whole this was a solid first effort for Apple at streaming live sporting events. It was up to the quality of any major network, and had better-than-average graphics. I’ll be tuning in frequently throughout the season, and I look forward to Apple adding other sports in the future. I’m sure interested NFL execs were tuning in to this. I think this is the start of something pretty big for Apple TV+.