Just a Single : Braves Help CBS, but It’s Still Losing Big on Baseball Pact

The strong finish to the National League Championship Series may have eased the pain, but it won’t reverse CBS’ losses from its four-year, $1.06-billion baseball contract.

The Atlanta Braves’ seventh-game playoff victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates helped CBS beat NBC’s Thursday night lineup of “Bill Cosby” and “Cheers” for the first time in six years.

Game 7’s national rating of 19.8--for a prime-time audience of 18.2 million households--was the highest for a league championship game since 1988’s seventh game between the Dodgers and the New York Mets, which scored a 22.2. (Wednesday night’s Game 6 had done almost as well, with a rating of 18.3, or 16.9 million households.)

CBS officials say exciting playoffs provide momentum for the World Series, which starts tonight. They also say the Thursday night ratings victory over NBC helps appease advertisers who signed on for baseball and have had precious little to cheer about this year.

But overall, CBS’ baseball deal remains, in the words of media buyer Bill Sherman of McCann Erickson Worldwide, “one of the major fiascoes in the history of TV.”

The combination of a weak advertising climate and a proliferation of competing TV sports has made baseball a losing proposition, even in post-season. Ratings have declined steadily for the league playoffs, and the last two World Series have ended in four-game sweeps, dampening ratings and reducing advertising slots.

On Oct. 9, CBS postponed announcing its third-quarter earnings, saying it would wait until after the series to reevaluate the carrying values of its baseball contract.

The broadcaster had already written off $55 million (after taxes) on the deal and set aside another $115 million against future losses. When the earnings report was delayed, analysts said they expected those losses to grow.

CBS had to cut prices during the league playoffs, from an original asking price of $100,000 per 30-second spot to as low as $75,000, advertising sources said. It may be the same story in the World Series, where the network initially was asking $300,000 to $325,000 a spot and may settle for as low as $225,000, sources said.

“We still have a very soft sports marketplace--we’re not going to get around that,” said David Poltrack, CBS senior vice president for planning and research. However, he added: “If we have a good World Series . . . the event’s marquee value will have been reconfirmed.”

It was bad news for CBS that the league championships pitted four teams from small TV markets. (The big-market Dodgers and Boston Red Sox were eliminated just before the end of the regular season.)

But from an advertising standpoint, CBS got the best of the four possible World Series matchups, since the Braves have something of a national following as home team for Turner Broadcasting System’s Atlanta cable superstation, and the Minnesota Twins are more popular than their playoff opponents, the Toronto Blue Jays.

The rule of thumb used to be that a network covered its costs in the fifth game of a series and made money on the last two games. But with the softened advertising market, CBS’ break-even point probably won’t come until Game 6 this year, according to several advertising sources.

Declining Ratings

A list of the five highest-rated and five lowest-rated baseball League Championship Series since 1981 shows that all the top ratings came in the early 1980s, while the lower ratings came in the past four years. The Braves-Pirates series that ended Thursday fell in the middle, with an average rating of 14.4.

Top Five

No. of Average Year Winner-Loser games rating 1982 St. Louis-Dodgers 5 19.8 1982 Milwaukee-Angels 5 17.7 1984 Detroit-Kansas City 3 16.7 1981 NY Yankees-Oakland 3 16.5 1985 Kansas City-Toronto 7 15.8

Bottom Five

No. of Average Year Winner-Loser games rating 1991 Minnesota-Toronto 5 9.2 1989 Oakland-Toronto 5 10.0 1988 Oakland-Boston 4 11.0 1990 Oakland-Boston 4 11.1 1990 Cincinnati-Pittsburgh 6 12.0

Source: Nielsen Media Research