Says Fox Sports President Eric Shanks: "It's a video game view of baseball for the first time."

The idea is to use one camera per game that will move along cables and be controlled by operators who are supposed to keep those cameras away from fair and foul territory until pitches cross home plate.

Then the cameras, like the cable-cams that now routinely hover over NFL games, can roam over the field at altitudes ranging from about 12 to 80 feet above ground.

Says Shanks: "It's like the football cable-cams, they can hover all over."

Like hover over bases to give new overhead views of close plays. (Which, if it works, might factor into discussions of bringing instant replay to MLB.) And, Shanks says, they will hover over managers talking to their pitchers on the mound: "But we've agreed with MLB to not put microphones on the camera, so we won't listen in to conversations."

Still, the new close-ups should be a huge help to lip-reading viewers.

Conversations on the mound, MLB executive vice president Tim Brosnan says, "are still sacrosanct. Although universally, fans want to hear that conversation."

Although, presumably, lots of expletives would have to be deleted on-air.

Fox plans to test the on-field flyovers on its Philadelphia Phillies-Atlanta Braves game Saturday (4 p.m. ET), then use them on its NL Championship Series and World Series coverage. MLB's Brosnan says they fit the big picture: "The commissioner has given us the mandate, particularly with the jewel events, to create television programming that's as compelling as we can make it."

Which begs the obvious: What if a ball in play hits a hovering camera?

Brosnan says MLB doesn't "have the ground rule just yet" about what would be called if that happened. And, he says the placement of cables over the field will be handled "on a case-by-case basis" to account for each ballpark's layout. But overall, he says, MLB wants to keep cameras out of the way: "In our thirst to bring fans closer to the game, we still can't intrude on the competition."