Sports Publications

TV could strike it rich

Sporting News, The, July 29, 2002 by Fritz Quindt

I heard Bob Costas, a former baseball announcer, tell Phil Donahue that chances of a strike are less than 50-50. So surely there's no reason to sweat, and in September this cautionary tale may be as bogus as WorldCom stock. Still, if labor pains give birth to another dearth, it probably won't be baseball's 31st greatest moment.

Not only will sports tickers not be as interesting; we'll lose four games weekly on the ESPNs, and Baseball Tonight will go nighty-night. At least the Worldwide Leader can segue to football; what are TBS and WGN to do without Braves and Cubs? (Man does not live by Dinner & A Movie and elimiDATE alone.) Until basketball/ hockey season, Fox Sports Net has nothing to replace MLB but Best Damn Sports Show Period. Fox can return Game of the Week time to affiliates. But without the World Series in October, Fox will have to scramble for substitute prime-time programming of similar mass appeal, intrigue and prestige. Hello, Celebrity Boxing.

These are hypothetical responses to a hypothetical situation; no TV executive admits on the record to contingency plans for fear of appearing partisan. But have you noticed telecasters aren't saying a strike will devastate them?

You'd think they'd be petrified because baseball been berry berry good to them this season. Audiences for ESPN Wednesday-Sunday games have grown, and new Monday and afternoon exposures are rating higher than shows that resided there. FSN Nielsens are up 9 percent (in Seattle, the Mariners are beating Friends). Mother Fox has sold 70 percent of its World Series commercials, at $325,000 per.

Yet baseball needs TV way more than TV needs baseball. Each club is scheduled to bank $21 million from Fox, ESPN and the superstations this season, excluding local and regional deals, but it's not guaranteed. If the games stop, so does the money train. Instead of buying strike insurance, most telecasters have inserted no-play, no-pay clauses in their contracts, unlike in 1994.

Some telecasters--small-market stations with a club hopelessly out of contention, or especially cable networks--might be happy to be MLB-free. What they'd lose in not showing a September's-worth of games would be offset in production-cost savings from not having to show 'em ... and they'd continue to assess operators a premium per-subscriber fee for baseball! In the words of an employee at a certain Los Angeles-based regional network: "At least in the short term, we'd cry all the way to the bank."