Padres Will Be Playing for a Champion’s Loot on Cable TV This Year

No matter how well the Padres perform on the field this season, the team’s performance on cable television likely will prove lucrative in 1985.

Officials at Cox Cable San Diego say the firm has already sold about $300,000 worth of advertising for the system’s pay-per-view cablecasts of Padres home games--about three times the amount sold for the 40 on-cable home games in all of 1984.

By the time the season ends, ad revenue could total more than 400% of last year’s figure, led by anchor advertiser Stroh Brewing Co. and 11 local businesses, according to Robert E. Mahlman, advertising sales manager at Cox. He also manages the new San Diego Interconnect, Cox’s subsidiary that coordinates local ad sales for Music Television, ESPN, USA Network and Cable News Network.

Now included in that group is San Diego Cable Sports Network, also a Cox subsidiary, which will oversee Cox’s pay-per-view operations.

The network will be composed of Cox’s 250,000 subscribers--the largest cable customer count in the nation--and Southwestern Cable’s 85,000 subscribers. Together, the two systems reach 60% to 65% of the potential cable customers in their service areas, according to Cox officials, who announced both the network and Southwestern’s participation Monday.

As many as 20,000 San Diego households are expected to subscribe to the Padres telecasts this year, about double last year’s subscriber count, according to Robert McRann, the Cox Cable San Diego president who doubles as president of the new sports network. Southwest subscribers must buy all 40 games, but Cox customers have several options on game packages.

In addition to advertising and subscription revenue, the hidden benefit to Cox will be the accompanying installation of so-called addressable cable converters, which can be controlled in the household by the cable operator.

The addressable feature enables the cable system to offer pay-per-view events--from sports to concerts to movies--and allows the operator to add certain pay-television services or, in the case of delinquent bills, to terminate a customer’s service.

Cox had only about 50,000 addressable converters in the field when baseball season started last year; that number could reach 120,000 by April, according to Marty Youngman, Cox’s pay-per-view manager. Cox has previously said that the entire “retrofitting” of its system to addressable converters could cost about $30 million.

Of Southwestern’s 85,000 customers, about 25,000 already have addressable converters, according to Daniel Mahon, Southwest’s vice president of marketing and programming.

Pay-per-view will become increasingly popular because the 6 million addressable converters in the nation are expected to balloon to about 30 million by 1990, predicted McRann.

“The whole arena will explode toward the end of the decade,” he said, adding that the local sports network will expand to include other events and features. Cox’s was the nation’s first pay-per-view for baseball. It differs from the regional sports channel approach because it does not offer round-the-clock sports programming.

Television sportscaster Ted Leitner and Bob Chandler, director of public relations for the Padres, will handle play-by-play action.