Ever since the inception of baseball being broadcast on TV, and for many decades after, the concept was simple: Follow the action. Follow the ball.
And that made sense.
Viewers wanted to watch baseball, and really any sport on their televisions, like they were at the game. They wanted to see pitchers pitch, they wanted to see fielders field, they wanted to see hitters hit. And that's what camera operators and TV producers tried to give them.
"Reaction shots, reactions were not -- they just covered the game," legendary sports TV executive and producer John Filippelli told me over Zoom. "Things that underscored the emotion of the game were not part of the television lexicon in those days."
That is ... until the night of October 21, 1975.
One of NBC's World Series cameras, located deep inside the Green Monster, stayed on Carlton Fisk after his game-winning home run rather than follow the ball. In doing so, the world witnessed perhaps the most iconic player home run reaction of all time: The beloved Red Sox catcher screaming, urging, frantically waving the ball fair.
"It changed sports television history," Filippelli said. "That was the first reaction shot that I can recall."
The shot paved the way for cameras staying on players and catching those raw human moments -- like Kirk Gibson's fist-pump, Tom Lawless' bat flip, Vlad Jr.'s grand slam bat toss.
But why did the camera stay on Fisk that night? Was it a directive from the production truck? Was it a rogue cameraman, the late Lou Gerard, just thinking it was a good idea?
Well, no, it was a rat. It all happened because of an extremely large rat.
"There are rodents in that wall," Filippelli said. "And this one was a particularly big one. It was disconcerting to him, distracting to him. When the ball got hit, it was really playing around with his foot, and he just decided he was gonna stay there. As opposed to trying to punt it and be someplace else. He decided he was just gonna stay there, he didn't have another option."
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Filippelli, now 74, wasn't at Fenway Park the night of Oct. 21, 1975, but he was working with the crew remotely from New York City's NBC offices.
He was at the outset of a brilliant 51-year, 151 Emmy-winning career that would see him cover multiple World Series, Olympic games and Super Bowls -- he'd later serve as SVP and executive producer at the YES Network for 25 seasons. He was responsible for the on-screen score bug at FOX Sports in the 1990s. He came up with the idea of airing regular-speed instant replays.
But during the '75 World Series, in his early 20s, he was a simple highlight logger.
"Yeah, that night I was logging highlights from the World Series for NBC," Filippelli told me. "Writing down time codes when things would happen."
Even though he was 225 miles away, he was in constant communication with his colleagues who were on-site and could hear everything happening in the truck. He also worked directly with many of the key figures involved with the play for decades after, including director Harry Coyle and Gerard. He might as well have been in the now 113-year-old Boston landmark for one of its biggest moments.
"I'm there second-hand," Filippelli reiterated. "But again, I was privy, because of my position at NBC, especially in later years, as producer of Game of the Week and doing all those World Series, working with all those guys. I heard the story again and again and they all verify each other."
Gerard, that night, knew exactly what his role was as a cameraman inside Fenway Park's 37-foot left-field wall. He was a veteran at that point.
"It was '75, so I had just graduated high school," his daughter Marcia Dooley told me over Zoom. "It was middle career for him, I would say."
His job was to follow the game and catch angles of plays the center-field camera and, at that time, the very few others around the ballpark, couldn't: Isolated shots of a player batting, maybe a behind-the-play view of a stop and deep throw from the shortstop, some fan footage down the first-base line after a big hit.
You can see how Bernie Carbo's game-tying, pinch-hit three-run homer was treated by the broadcast just four innings before. The swing, the ball path and some celebrations in the dugout and stands; the camera didn't really linger on Carbo after he hit the ball.
In the 12th, with the game still tied, Gerard had that same mindset.
But inside the old, cramped wall, he had some visitors. Well, Gerard was really the visitor.
They were their first. This was their home.
"Oh, the Green Monster had rats," Dooley said. "Lots of rats."
"I've been in that wall and I've seen those things crawling around back in the day," Filippelli said, smiling. "It isn't just me that's seen them, it's kind of legend of that wall."
And when Fisk came strolling up to the plate, a few of the Monster-dwelling creatures got a little too close for comfort.
"At that point, they were crawling all around him," Dooley said. "There was a rat, but there was also a metal pole that was in his way. So between the rat and the pole, he said, 'Well, I can't really get a shot of the ball, let me try and get a shot of Fisk.'"
"He saw a rat and he kinda froze," Filippelli said.
Gerard described the moment to Mass Live back in 2012.
Harry Coyle, who was the director at the time, he told me, ‘Lou, you have to follow the ball if he hits it.’ I said, ‘Harry, I can’t, I’ve got a rat on my leg that’s as big as a cat. It’s staring me in the face. I’m blocked by a piece of metal on my right.’ So he said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘How about if we stay with Fisk, see what happens?’ ”
"Coyle said, 'Go for it,'" Dooley laughed. "And that was it."
Yes. That was it.
The NBC truck was, understandably, in chaos after the game-winning homer.
Coyle and producer Roy Hammerman were racing through all the shots and replays of the home run and throwing the best ones on air.
"They didn't know they had it, that's the other great story," Filippelli said. "The truck didn't realize what they had initially, they had no idea. The tape guys kept hitting what they call a 'tape me light' -- a light to get the attention of the front deck. Harry's busy cutting to his cameras, taking his shots, going to his replays -- so he's not seeing the output of all the different machines. They had a million things going on. Eventually they saw it and they aired it. But if you go back to the original telecast, it was about the fifth or sixth replay aired."
You can hear the announcers, almost shocked that the cameras caught Fisk's reaction.
Fisk's wave was the only thing people wanted to see.
When Filippelli re-aired the game on NBC later in the week, that was the first replay he used. The left-field foul pole was eventually renamed Fisk's Pole. Kids imitated the "Get over! Get over!" motion during backyard Wiffle ball games, Oscar-winning movies harkened back to it in their most Oscar-winning moments.
But its ultimate impact was the influence it had on sports television coverage: Viewers saw a player's emotions after a huge moment and loved it. They wanted more. And TV producers and directors responded in kind.
"That redefined how to cover a baseball game, it really did," Filippelli told me. "All it came about, first because of Fisk. Then, because of Gibson. Harry Coyle [also the director in the 1988 World Series] learned to stay right there. He didn't move. You never would've gotten the fist pump. [Mark] McGwire, you would've missed him going around first. It's all connective tissue, if you will. And it started with Fisk ... All because of Lou Gerard and a rat."
Gerard, who passed away in 2013, was pretty humble about his footage that changed TV sports coverage forever.
"To him, that's what he did," Dooley said. "You know, 'Let me get this shot because this is what I can get.' And, well, it turned out to be a good shot."
Cover art by Tom Forget