Driving Them with Sports Science

Mid-August is a kind of calm before the storm for ESPN.

The true heat of Major League Baseball’s pennant races is still a few weeks away. The incendiary sports media phenomenon that is pro and college football is still mired in the dog days of pre-season camp.

So, when a 13-year-old girl with a 70-mile-per-hour fastball suddenly turned the Little League World Series — traditionally a lightly viewed niche audience gambit for ESPN — into a ratings smash, the so-called “World Wide Leader” in sports broadcasting had to respond. Quickly.

Enter John Brenkus, the mastermind behind the ESPN Sport Science shorts that have become a staple of the Disney-owned network’s flagship daily news program, SportsCenter.

Just a couple of days after Mo’ne Davis exploded into a media supernova that would eventually land her on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Sport Science had a nifty little segment on her, fastidiously breaking down her Major League–level pitching mechanics.

Brenkus’s BASE Productions in Burbank, California, has produced close to 1,000 Sport Science segments. Showcasing Davis’s awesome throwing mechanics — which was probably the perfect supplementary way for ESPN to respond to an audience that wanted to know who this girl was and how she threw so hard — came pretty naturally.

“It used to take weeks to get a segment on the air,” says Brenkus, who is also the on-air face of the Sport Science franchise. “Now we can turn things around in a couple of days.”

In a culture captivated over the past few years by data, Brenkus and BASE have become adept at capturing it in informative, bite-sized nuggets.

BASE started out 20 years ago as a small production company serving Washington, D.C. pro sports teams. But Brenkus and his colleagues cut their teeth amid the basic-cable original programming explosion. Shows like National Geographic’s Fight Science — in which BASE would lab-test various martial arts weapons and techniques — led to the finely tuned machine that Sport Science has become.

BASE flexibly employs a production staff of 30 to 100, many of them experts in the various kinetic movements of sports. “We’ve developed fantastic relationships in both the athletic and scientific communities,” Brenkus says. “We have a very well-versed staff.”

The Sports Science enterprise also has credibility in the sports world, specifically the NFL draft. The company’s Burbank lab has developed a reputation for predicting how high players like Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles will go in the NFL’s wildly popular player selection process. Now, pretty much every agent for a prospective high-priced NFL rookie has BASE on speed dial.

“Four out of the last five players who scored highest on our metrics won [NFL] Rookie of the Year,” Brenkus notes.