CBS Suspends Regular Play as Games Begin : Television: Only time and ratings will tell if the network’s coverage of postseason baseball will blow its new-season momentum. Opposing networks hope to take advantage.

CBS’ folly? Or a grand slam?

The next few weeks will tell, as longtime television doormat CBS, finally on a prime-time roll, now virtually has to suspend its regular nightly programming for . . . baseball.

Of course, it’s the cream of baseball: the National and American League playoffs, unfolding this week and next, and then the World Series.

But will it blow CBS’ new-season momentum?

Will the women and kids that CBS desperately wants to attract tune out?

True, CBS’ strong Monday lineup could go untouched by the fall fever because there are no games scheduled on the nights that “Major Dad,” “Murphy Brown,” “Designing Women” and “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” deliver their dependable ratings.

Nonetheless, will the eye-popping baseball deal that looked so good to CBS in 1988, when it desperately needed something to keep it on the map, turn out to be an unexpectedly ill-timed, billion-dollar disaster?

That is the extraordinary price CBS paid for the exclusive network TV rights to baseball for four years starting in 1990. Actually, it was $1.1 billion.

Are Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Boston and Oakland the teams that can give CBS its money’s worth? Oh, how CBS must have prayed for contenders from New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, with the ratings impact of their huge hometown audiences.

Still, there’s something magical about the playoffs and especially the World Series, where any team can capture the nation’s fancy. And Oakland is surely one of the great teams of all time.

But, yes, CBS is nervous.

“When we bought baseball two years ago, people said, ‘It’ll really help your prime time’--because we were doing so badly,” says George Schweitzer, CBS’ senior vice president of communications. “Now, people call and say, ‘Aren’t you concerned that you have all this baseball and your shows won’t be on?’ ”

If past ratings patterns repeat themselves, Schweitzer concedes, “The games will generally start slow, then build,” capping with the World Series, which begins Oct. 16. With its first playoff game Thursday, CBS ran second to NBC for the night, although it did win the final hour of prime time.

In the grand tradition of network sportsmanship, meanwhile, NBC and ABC will try to kill CBS during its baseball run.

Brandon Tartikoff, chairman of the NBC Entertainment Group, makes no bones about it. He and his network are still bitter about losing the baseball franchise that once was theirs.

Tartikoff has invested $30 million in female-oriented miniseries that make up 11 of 17 hours of special programming that NBC is using against CBS’ baseball. The first miniseries, “Jackie Collins’ Lucky / Chances,” begins Sunday and runs for six hours over three nights.

Then, on Oct. 15 and 16, NBC will offer another miniseries--two separate films based on best-selling books: “Danielle Steel’s ‘Kaleidoscope’ ” and “Danielle Steel’s ‘Fine Things.”’

“It’s about as nasty as you can get,” Tartikoff says slyly about the competition. “It’s just a little game, you know. CBS has done well. But we’re in business. While we’re not the Goliath we were a year ago, there’s a great sense of spirit in going up against one of the great remaining events.”

Clearly another incentive for Tartikoff to sock across this counterprogramming is that all 11 hours of the two miniseries come from his network’s in-house company, NBC Productions.

“I’m not saying we’re going to beat these games,” says Tartikoff, “but I think that we can be competitive for the first week of the playoffs.”

CBS reportedly will lose millions because of the huge price it paid for baseball.

Ted Harbert, executive vice president of prime time for ABC, puts it politely, saying, “I don’t think they’re going to make any money” from the playoffs and Series.

Tartikoff isn’t so polite: “Whether CBS wants to admit it or not, those losses are big and real, and the advertising marketplace is depressed, and they’re out there with a lot of (commercial) spots that are still unsold, according to our spies.”

OK--but for viewers, including super baseball fan Tartikoff, the name of the game is still fun. And for CBS, there was plenty of good reason to lay out all that dough in 1988.

A little TV history. . . .

When CBS came up with $1.1 billion for the national pastime, it was for a lot more than baseball. Dead in the water, directionless and depressed, CBS was making a statement that it was still in the network business to stay--and here was an incredible gesture to prove it.

The message was clear: CBS was starting to rebuild its framework as a real competitor, and the playoffs and World Series were a terrific weapon to promote its prime-time shows--once it got shows worth promoting.

In 1988, CBS had no major sports events to hype its fall lineup, while NBC had the Seoul Summer Olympics and the World Series, and ABC had the National and American League playoffs.

But now it’s 1990, and CBS is showing clearly how it intends to benefit from its new baseball launching pad. Just two days ago, as the playoffs began, the network streamlined its fall lineup--dumping the flop “E.A.R.T.H. Force,” giving Dan Rather’s “48 Hours” a key new time slot and making numerous other strategic moves it could promote for the next few weeks.

Whether the hype works remains to be seen, but at least underdog CBS--the first network since 1975 to broadcast both the playoffs and World Series--is in the ballgame.

“Baseball gives us a great attraction over the next few weeks,” says Schweitzer. “Even a poor baseball performance will do better than our weekly average rating. Plus we keep intact our winning Monday night lineup. Plus we keep ’60 Minutes’ on the air as a lead-in to the Sunday games.

“It’s our first year with this baseball package, and we have a lot of people looking at us, saying, ‘Was it smart to do this?’ Well, NBC and ABC had it all those years. And if they had their choice, they would still like to have baseball.”

Well, not exactly, maintains ABC’s Harbert: “It would not be a smart move for this network. We’ve got a lot of successful shows. The deal was to take all of the baseball package or none, and we said to ourselves that we just don’t want to take our programs off for the month of October and start in November.

“We want our schedule to be based on our weekly series, and we want to engender as much loyalty for them as we can, and we think that keeping them on the air is the right thing to do.”

Harbert notes that ABC series performed spectacularly against an early playoff game last year, with “Who’s the Boss?” getting 33% of the audience, “The Wonder Years” 35%, “Roseanne” 42%, “Chicken Soup” 30% and “thirtysomething” 25%.

Still, says Tartikoff, baseball is high-octane broadcasting. “Nobody loves baseball more than I,” he says, “but it can be counterprogrammed.”

Baseball--it’s more than a game.