Major League Baseball on television
In particular, out of market baseball would attract customers to superstations in the late 20th Century, such as WGN and WTBS airing Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves games, respectively.
In 1997, newly launched terrestrial broadcaster Channel 5 took over as the rights holder, showing two games a week, including Sunday Night Baseball, under the title of MLB on Five.
At first, ABC hesitated at the idea of a nationally televised regular season baseball program, but gave Scherick the green light to sign up teams; unfortunately, only three (the Philadelphia Athletics, Cleveland Indians,[7] and Chicago White Sox[8][9] were interested.
[10] To make matters worse, Major League Baseball barred the Game of the Week from airing within fifty miles of any big-league city.
CBS took over the Saturday Game in 1955 (the rights were actually set up through the Falstaff Brewing Corporation,[12]) retaining Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blattner as the announcers and adding Sunday coverage in 1957.
In 1959, ABC broadcast the best-of-three playoff series[13][14][15] (to decide the National League pennant) between Milwaukee Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers.
By 1964, CBS' Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese worked Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
Changes baseball underwent during this time, such as expansion franchises and increasing the schedule from 154 games to 162, led to a wider audience for network and local television.
On September 1, 1975, NBC's last Monday Night Baseball game, in which the Montréal Expos beat the host Philadelphia Phillies 6–5.
In the aftermath of the thrilling 1975 World Series,[25] attendance figures, television contracts (this time including two networks, NBC and now ABC), and player salaries all soared.
Major League Baseball media director John Lazarus said of the new arrangement between NBC and ABC "Ratings couldn't get more from one network so we approached another."
In 1980, 22 teams (all but the Atlanta Braves, Houston Astros, New York Mets, and St. Louis Cardinals) took part in a one-year cable deal with UA-Columbia.
The deal involved the airing of a Thursday night Game of the Week in markets at least 50 miles (80 km) from a major league park.
On April 7, 1983, Major League Baseball, ABC, and NBC agreed to terms of a six-year television package worth $1.2 billion.
On December 14, 1988, CBS (under the guidance of Commissioner Peter Ueberroth) paid approximately $1.8 billion for exclusive television rights for over four years (beginning in 1990).
Reportedly, after the huge television contracts with CBS and ESPN were signed, franchises spent their excess millions on free agents.
In the end, CBS wound up losing approximately half a billion dollars from their television contract with Major League Baseball.
With games condensed to the thirty-second highlight reel, and the added microscope of news organizations that needed to fill 24 hours of time, the amount of attention paid to major league players magnified to staggering levels compared to where it had been just 20 years prior.
It brought with it increased attention for individual players, who reached superstar status nationwide on careers that often were not as compelling as those who had come before them in a less media intense time.
[29] Accordingly, in the same time period – coupled with free agency and arbitration rights – the average player salary rose roughly tenfold to over $1.3 million.
By 1998, ESPN enjoyed its largest baseball audience ever (a 9.5 Nielsen rating) as Mark McGwire hit his 61st home run of the season.
[30] After the fall-out from CBS' financial problems from their four-year-long television contract with Major League Baseball, MLB decided to go into the business of producing the telecasts themselves.
The advertisers were reportedly excited about the arrangement with The Baseball Network because the new package included several changes intended to boost ratings, especially among younger viewers.
Others would argue that a primary reason for its failure was its abandoning of localized markets in favor of more lucrative and stable advertising contracts afforded by turning to a national model of broadcasting.
Unlike The Baseball Network, Fox went back to the tried and true format of televising regular season games (approximately 16 weekly telecasts that normally began on Memorial Day weekend) on Saturday afternoons.
Debuted exclusively on DirecTV, the service allowed fans to watch regionally televised broadcasts of out-of-market baseball games.
In 2002, Major League Baseball launched Mlb.tv, its digital out-of-market sports package, with a game between the Texas Rangers and the New York Yankees on August 26.
The key details of the agreement were: ESPN's Monday and Wednesday telecasts were mostly nonexclusive, meaning the games also can be televised by each club's local broadcasters.
After weeks of speculation and rumors, at the 2006 All-Star Game, Major League Baseball and the Fox Broadcasting Company announced a renewal of their contract through 2013.
In August 2012, it was announced that ESPN and Major League Baseball had agreed on a new eight-year deal that greatly increased the network's studio and game content across all of its platforms.
