Sports Thrown for a Loss by Heavy Hand of TV

Don Mischer--a producer of the Kennedy Center Honors and the Emmys among others --recently said he cautions people when they consider transforming some fledgling presentation into a televised event. TV, he noted, has a way of changing whatever it touches.

Clearly, television’s oily fingerprints are all over the world of big-time sports, shaping not only the way games are played but how they are experienced by those who actually possess the trust fund necessary to view the action in person.

This comes to mind in the midst of what is traditionally one of the busiest and best sports times of the year. The college and pro football seasons have just started to get interesting (unless you hail from a local Pac-10 school), the Major League Baseball playoffs are underway, hockey sticks are swinging, and the NBA basketball season lurks around the corner.

In addition, Los Angeles was recently deprived of an NFL expansion team, so everyone “ready for some football,” to quote that ubiquitous ABC jingle, had best get used to obtaining their fix via the tube. The NFL franchise instead went to Houston--a city that not only appreciates football but the value of moist towelettes to sponge away barbecue sauce and truncating the sentence “Are all of you planning to attend?” to the more economical “Y’allcumin’?”

Television’s impact on how sports are played often has to do with simply when they are played. Consider baseball, for example, where all World Series games must take place at night, which can be a little chilly in Cleveland or Boston by late October.

Any UCLA or USC fan, meanwhile, can tell you that college football--once a Saturday afternoon affair, the way God and Knute Rockne intended it--can now take place pretty much any time between noon and midnight. Game times are often set a mere five days in advance so ABC can determine which game to show at 12:30 p.m., followed by 3:30 and 7:15 p.m. kickoffs on Fox’s cable sports channels.

Dragging the kids out to see the old alma mater play takes on a whole new meaning when it means keeping them out until long after the local network-owned stations have finished with sports highlights on their 11 p.m. newscasts. One USC game this season, played in Hawaii, began locally on Saturday and ended Sunday.

As for duration, thanks in part to TV timeouts, the average college football game currently runs slightly longer than “Gone With the Wind.” With all those breaks, you’d think the networks would have plenty of time for commercials and on-air promotion. But noooo, advertising is rather awkwardly squeezed between every play.

The quarterback throws a screen pass that gains 6 yards. “Nice catch, and tonight on CBS you can catch ’60 Minutes,’ followed by a very special ‘Touched by an Angel.’ ” A draw play nets only a yard. “And now let’s get an update on the Nokia-Frito Lay-Federal Express passing stats.” A punt is downed inside the 20. “So the home team takes the field. And what a gorgeous aerial shot of the stadium, courtesy of the Budweiser blimp.”

Something--a splashy graphic, pointless statistics sponsored by somebody, an ad for Tuesday’s “Spin City,” a preview of next week’s games or the halftime show--must be happening at all times. Perish the thought anyone should have a chance to look down at a newspaper, consider flipping to a better game, or just enjoy a fleeting moment’s silence.

Baseball, essentially down time interrupted by bursts of activity, lends itself especially well to such promotion. Even scanning the stands has become a not-so-subtle commercial for that particular network’s prime-time lineup, with actors and actresses who wouldn’t know a slider from a slide rule conveniently located wherever the camera settles.

It requires no special genius to understand why this is happening. When mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns Fox, bid a then-astounding $1.58 billion to steal CBS’ NFL football rights in 1993, the sports world changed forever.

Money doesn’t always just talk. In sports, it screams loudly, and four networks--ABC, CBS, Fox and ESPN--cranked up the volume when they agreed to pay an aggregate $17.6 billion for their football contracts last year, a sum exceeding the gross national product of Paraguay.

Now, follow the bouncing bucks: Fox owns the Dodgers. Time Warner owns the Braves. Disney owns the Angels and Mighty Ducks. Ticket prices have climbed into the stratosphere. The average person can barely afford parking, much less the seats. Corporations ante up to fill those plush luxury boxes.

Those not blessed with such corporate largess stay at home, tuning in sports on television. They view ABC and ESPN, owned by Disney. They turn to TBS and TNT, owned by Time Warner. They watch Fox and Fox Sports West. The money finds its way into the big guys’ pockets, one way or another.

Admittedly, for sports enthusiasts, being a couch potato isn’t all that bad. Games are televised around the clock, and thanks to advances in technology, the coverage is pretty astounding. There are countless replay angles, zooming close-ups, super-slow-motion, catcher-cams, goalie-cams, radar guns clocking every pitch, even a computer-generated line highlighting the first-down yardage needed.

Moreover, from a TV viewer’s perspective, having no local NFL team is beneficial. Fox and CBS needn’t worry about putting on games that might cut into local gate receipts, providing them wider latitude in scheduling. Instead of being saddled with the local team’s road games--as L.A. was when the Rams and Raiders were in town--the networks are free to provide the most attractive matchup available.

While ratings in Los Angeles may indeed be lower without a local rooting interest, that’s more of a concern for the networks than the fans. As for the excitement of experiencing games first-hand, at current prices many die-hard fans couldn’t attend anyway.

So where does all of this leave us? At least in the near term--until some hapless, unloved NFL franchise is left at our doorstep--it means we get to watch football the way God and Rupert Murdoch intended.

On television.

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Brian Lowry’s column appears on Tuesdays. He can be reached by e-mail at brian.lowry@latimes.com.