When Ticker Clicks, Information Arrives in Heartbeat

On the eighth floor of a renovated warehouse overlooking the Manhattan skyline, Peter Bavasi has seen the future and it is now--a superhighway of instant sports information delivered over lanes that keep getting wider and wider.

“Let me show you this,” says the former baseball executive, punching a few keys on his computer. In a moment, he has access to the latest sports news, from a pitching change at Dodger Stadium to the third inning score of the Macon-Savannah minor league game in the South Atlantic League.

“You want stats, lineups, team notes? Then all you have to do . . . “

And that’s just the beginning. In Toronto, a new pager gives fans an up-to-the-minute rundown on Blue Jay games. In Montreal, fans can choose various camera angles to follow the action of a Canadian hockey game on television. In other cities, they can open a window on the TV and watch statistics scroll by as players come to bat, or catch updated scores rolling past in a banner at the bottom of the screen. Then there are other on-line services that provide a full diet of instant and archival sports information.

At the heart of these breakthroughs is the new technology provided by computers and satellites--and SportsTicker, a small, prosperous company that is the unanimous and usually uncredited source for most of the news, scores and statistics that fill our TV screens, newspapers and, perhaps too often, our heads.

SportsTicker, a division of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, is the descendant of the old Western Union baseball ticker founded in 1909. Until a decade ago, it relied on narrow tape that delivered scores and home runs and pitching changes at a leisurely pace, and in those days if you wanted to know the top 10 batters in, say, the double-A Eastern League, you waited about a week for the mail.

“I can remember my dad going over to the old glass-domed ticker looking for a score,” says SportsTicker president Bavasi of his father, Buzzie, former general manager of the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers. “There’d be reams of yellow tape on the floor, and invariably the thing would jam and no one knew how to change the tape until someone called for the public relations guy.”

Now cut to the era of instant communications. Inning-by-inning and quarter-by-quarter scores pour into SportsTicker’s eighth-floor newsroom from 700 part-time correspondents who cover every professional and major college sports event in the country. In a flash, the data is digested by computers and shot back on satellite to hundreds of clients in North and South America and Japan. On an average day, the service generates 4 million characters, or the equivalent of 800,000 words, of news and statistics. The information crawls across sports-news display boards in hundreds of bars, casinos and airports. It automatically updates scoreboards in scores of stadiums. It appears on the screens of personal computers used by general managers and sportswriters. It floats by in a banner at the bottom of CNN’s Headline News, is set in agate type by newspapers from coast to coast, forms the basis of United Press International’s sports report and provides the grist for countless sports-talk shows on radio.

“The fun of the job is knowing that what we report appears everywhere, and I mean literally everywhere,” says Managing Editor Joe Caricelli, former UPI executive sports editor. “Some nights we’re covering hundreds of games in half a dozen sports and this place is like the old days at UPI, with people fighting for phones and tripping over chairs to get the stuff moving and out the door.”

Caricelli oversees a full-time staff of about 70, most of them sports nuts with a journalism degree or a couple of years’ newspaper experience. To be hired, an applicant must be computer literate and pass a sports quiz. (Sample question: Name the 1991 NBA rookie of the year and the NHL record holder for most goals by a rookie.) One of Caricelli’s former SportsTicker stringers, Jim Bowden, who used to cover Pittsburgh Pirate games, is now the general manager of the Cincinnati Reds.

Bavasi, former president of the Toronto Blue Jays and Cleveland Indians and one-time San Diego Padre general manager, credits CNN’s coverage of the Persian Gulf war with giving SportsTicker’s business a big boost. Suddenly, he says, everyone realized that instant communications were the wave of the future.

SportsTicker’s revenues increased nearly 15% last year, although Dow-Jones does not report what those revenues amounted to.

“Business has exploded,” he says. “And every day someone is coming up with new applications.”

Bavasi sends new sports software packages to his father in La Jolla to test and critique. The irony is that computer-whiz Buzzie Bavasi, 79, never mastered the typewriter during his 50 years in baseball and spent his career calling out to his secretary, “Edna, bring your pad in here, please, and take a letter.”