Can't sleep, found myself down a wikipedia rabbit hole reading about what a disaster
the rights to Major League Baseball were for CBS (1990-1993). CBS wrote the book on football, but had no clue how to produce baseball telecasts. They tried to make Tim McCarver their John Madden, which is dumb enough on its face without even considering this meant CBS wanted
Jack Buck to be subordinate to him. In a sign of things to come, CBS was more interested in market size than pennant races when it came to featuring games. And in a such-bad-food-and-such-small-portions twist, they only ended up carrying like 16 games a year. The whole thing went so poorly that the network asked baseball for their money back. Baseball said no.
CBS took a total bath on this, which had implications for two leagues: not only did their terrible approach devalue the entire concept of national baseball telecasting to this day, but the loss they took surely played a part in CBS losing the NFC to Fox. (An interesting side effect of
that is that in Milwaukee, channel 6 actually switched affiliations from CBS to Fox so as to continue being the Packers' flagship, leaving the Milwaukee market briefly CBS-less until a UHF station all the way at 58 picked up the network.) In the end, CBS lost their most treasured sports property the way NBC lost theirs, NBC and baseball having been joined at the hip since the days of AM radio.
Of current broadcasting deals, the NBA on ABC (or, gak, the NBA on ESPN, which is sometimes on ABC) probably leaves me the coldest. TNT, as a spiritual successor to the NBA on NBC, is probably the
best sports property on television; in comparison, the NBA on ESPN/ABC just feels like they're going through the motions. ESPN's strong suits were always baseball, hockey, and college sports: they always seemed like they were in over their heads with the NFL (does anyone else remember how wretched ESPN's Sunday Night Football was?) and only took on the NBA so they could boast all four major leagues.
I don't watch tennis like I used to, but I suspect ESPN's monopoly of the Slams leaves us worse off than when NBC and TNT had Wimbledon, or USA and CBS had the U.S. Open. Connors-Krickstein rain delay theater, your sign that summer was over!
_________________
Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.