Covering All the Bases

CBS and ESPN began four-year contracts to carry major league baseball in 1990 and both networks found their coverage to be flops on Wall Street.

CBS took a $55-million after-tax loss for its playoff and World Series coverage and a $115 million charge against earnings in the fourth quarter for losses during the remaining three years of its $1.06 billion contract. ESPN’s games didn’t draw ratings as high as promised, so ESPN had to give advertisers millions of dollars of additional free commercial time.

CBS didn’t fare any better on Main Street.

Plenty of scorn and furor was heaped on the network because unlike NBC, which it outbid for baseball, CBS did not carry a game each week.

On the other hand, the public accepted ESPN, which carried six games per week. Its telecasts reached an average of about 1.2 million households, a 60% larger audience than similar time periods in 1989.

ESPN opens its second year of regular season coverage with an Opening Day double-header Monday. Because of golf’s Masters, BS won’t start its baseball coverage until April 20.

What CBS Learned

It has been said that familiarity breeds contempt. CBS hopes viewers’ familiarity with its baseball coverage will instead lead to understanding and recognition for its ability to telecast the sport.

“Jack Buck, Tim McCarver, Dick Stockton, Jim Kaat and Pat O’Brien will all have a greater familiarity in a baseball context than they did a year ago when we were coming into people’s homes for the very first time,” executive producer Ted Shaker said. “(People were wondering) who are these guys? Do they know what they’re talking about? Can they cover the game? These are all legitimate questions for viewers and fans to have.

“We had to prove ourselves to a degree. Now we come back a little more familiar, a little smarter, and raring to go. Hopefully, the viewer will feel they recognize these guys, what they did, realize they understand the game and cover it well. That’s what we’re hoping for.”

The six-time Emmy-winner sees several benefits from having a year’s experience of covering baseball.

“There’s certainly a higher comfort level,” Shaker said. “Last year was the great unknown from one end to another. There’s a certain level of excitement with that, but there’s also a fear of the unknown.

“This year we’ve been once around the horn. That allows us to know a bit better the depth of the challenge and the people we deal with at Major League Baseball and with the clubs. We’ve experienced the major events, and that’s good information as we look ahead.”

Mistakes are common during the first year of any new venture, and Shaker recognizes one error CBS made.

“We all came to the conclusion that our cameras might have been too tight in certain situations, in not giving relationships between players and bases, etc. to give a greater sense of what it’s like to be at the ballpark,” Shaker said. “These were all goals to do in the first year and I thought we did well. But now we want to take the next step and do better, as you’d expect from any professional.”

A second technical change is that financial cutbacks will force CBS to use less production equipment (i.e. cameras, graphics and videotape replay machines, etc.) for most telecasts. Shaker said, however, cutbacks will not touch the “jewel events”--the All-Star Game, playoffs and World Series.

Then there is the sticky matter of not having a game on each week. Although ESPN, cable superstations, regional sports networks and local telecasts gave viewers more baseball than ever before last year, there still was the anger hurled at CBS for not having a game on each week. This season CBS will air 16 games during the 26-week regular season, limited because the network must cover golf, U.S. Open Tennis, college and NFL football.

Shaker not only understands those complaints, he backs them.

“Personally, I wish we could be on every week, but scheduling dictates that we don’t have the opportunities, and we have an arrangement with major league baseball that would prevent us from doing that.”

ESPN’s Game Plan

Baseball can be considered both a team and individual sport. ESPN will emphasize the latter this season.

“We’re going to stress the individual stars of the game, almost similar to what the NBA had done to market itself,” said play-by-play announcer Paul Olden. “We’ll be a little bit freer to talk about the individuals, rather than not offending anyone in a particular market.

“What we’ll have to generally make sure we do is explain things a little more fully. Whereas a local audience might understand a personal aside about a player, we might have to go into a little more detail for the regional and national audience, just to make sure everybody is clear what we’re talking about.”

Olden sees the trend of fans following players rather than teams as a “natural outgrowth” of the free-agent system and trades.

“The nature of the sport these days is for a team to get rid of players before too long because the team says it can’t afford to keep them,” Olden said. “In that world, you have to deal with the player movement aspect of sports. Focusing in on the individual makes it a little easier to bring the audience in.”

In his first year with ESPN, Olden will call Wednesday and Friday regional games. He’ll be seen in Southern California when the Dodgers and Angels are scheduled for national telecasts.