Baseball Night in America: The Bad Old Days of the Regional Pastime

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.

Making matters worse, every game of the newly-expanded playoffs were regionalized as well. This was almost unheard of in professional sports, as Major League Baseball and the NFL aired every playoff game nationally. To be sure, 1995 was an exciting year for the divisional playoffs, which served up two sweeps, a four game series, and an enduring classic between the Yankees and Mariners, which appeared in Dane Cook’s postseason teasers last year. With all four games airing simultaneously, the nation missed what was going on in playoff games elsewhere.

The situation was particularly infuriating for Cleveland Indians fans, who were witnessing (or in fact missing out on) history. The Indians were putting roughly a half-century of famous futility behind them and making a playoff run for the first time in many fans’ lives. If you lived south of WKYC or WEWS’ signal range however, you were shut out and stuck with the Reds. Even if games ended early (or if more exciting games were going on), the network signed off around 11:00 local time for the late local news.

The 1994 players’ strike doomed The Baseball Network, and an agreement in 1995 between ABC and NBC put TBN out of its misery. The Baseball Network was such an ordeal that both networks swore off baseball for the rest of the 20th century (with ABC actually following through).

Baseball soon singed a deal with Fox which was much more rooted in common sense. While regional action continued (albeit on more flexible Saturday afternoons), fans could at least see their own teams in action and every game of the playoffs. With The Baseball Network joining the Olympics Triplecast on the ash heap of sports television, it’s safe to say Major League Baseball has learned from this colossal failure. It is one of the few areas in which MLB has much to teach its fellow leagues.