When the leaves come back on the trees and the weather gets warmer once again, the Major League Baseball season commences, and does so with more television coverage than the average fan could want.

The ESPN family of networks treated fans to a full day of opening-day coverage on Monday, and those able to receive MLB Extra Innings will enjoy a week’s worth of out-of-market games. Baseball fans don’t know how well they have it in 2008, with just about every game expected to be on television in some form.

There was a time, however, when this wasn’t the case; when baseball did to its fans through television what the three other professional leagues are doing now. For many of us who were at least nine years old in 1994, that experience came in the ill-fated Baseball Network.

Every league has gone through some experience in which it alienated or completely drove away their fan base over the air. The NFL began this year by extorting its non-sports tier subscribing fans with games on the NFL Network. ABC’s coverage—excuse me, ESPN on ABC’s coverage—of the NBA Finals spent more time on Magic, Larry, Michael, and Eva Longoria Parker than on the games themselves. And the NHL’s new deal with NBC, in which exactly no money heads to Toronto, makes almost too much sense: fourth place sport, fourth place network. Major League Baseball attempted this feat as well when they negotiated their TV deal prior to the ’94 season.

CBS lost a half-billion dollars in the fallout of their 1990-1993 contract, and MLB realized that something different had to be tried. In order to minimize their gargantuan losses from seasons prior, the league decided to go to the unprecedented step of producing the games themselves. They would then distribute them on both ABC and NBC, who split coverage throughout the year. Under the plan, each network would get a number of games to broadcast regionally in prime time during the week, known as Baseball Night in America.

With exclusive coverage during these slots, losses would be minimized and, ideally, ratings maximized. The excitement of capturing new and younger fans—as well as maintaining a consistent and reliable schedule—gave way to inherent problems with Baseball Night in America almost immediately.

Games could only be seen at 8:00 local time, regardless of whether the local team was playing in the right time zone. Fans in Seattle were out of luck, for instance, if they wanted to see the Mariners in Boston at 5:00 Pacific. Likewise, exclusivity also put fans in multi-team markets at a disadvantage. Pennant-chasing Yankee fans would have to put up with watching the bottom-feeding Mets if TBN aired them instead.

The strike of 1994 put many of TBN’s problems on hold for another year, but they would surface once again. Placing regionalization above all else meant that certain important games could not be seen by much of the country, thus putting the pennant race of ’95 in the dark.

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