When Ted Turner purchased the Atlanta Braves in 1976, he was not shopping for a baseball dynasty. He was shopping for content material.
The Braves at the moment have been perpetually close to the backside of the league. They weren’t but “America’s Team,” and on most nights they barely even seemed like Atlanta’s group. A decade after relocating from Milwaukee, the group routinely performed earlier than 1000’s of empty seats. There have been rumors of relocating as soon as once more.
But Turner, who died Wednesday at age 87, noticed a chance: He had a nationwide TV station in want of programming. The FCC had cleared the approach for WTCG, later often called TBS, to grow to be the first-ever “superstation,” utilizing satellites to transmit throughout the nation.
And so, beginning in 1977, Turner turned the Atlanta Braves into a nightly content material machine. Their video games started beaming into households throughout the nation, night time after night time, summer season after summer season.
It was an audacious, deeply Turner-esque media play. The Braves didn’t should be good to be helpful; they only needed to be on. And in an period earlier than each MLB sport might be summoned on a smartphone, being on each night time mattered.
Turner was just some years away from launching NCS as the world’s first 24-hour, all-news cable community, however the playbook was already seen. And simply as banks, potential companions and newspaper house owners scoffed at his NCS concept, fellow group house owners scoffed at his concept of taking a regional sports activities group nationwide — particularly when he put himself in uniform for one sport in 1977 as the group’s supervisor, resulting in a rule that will ban that from ever occurring once more.
But the imaginative and prescient labored: Braves video games typically drew sturdy rankings and, over time, developed a big out-of-market fan base, main the franchise to typically be dubbed “America’s Team.”
That nickname cemented itself in the Nineties, when the group grew to become considered one of baseball’s foremost powers, successful the division title 12 months after 12 months, reaching the World Series 5 occasions and successful in 1995, and producing 5 Hall of Fame gamers.
As a results of nationwide availability and, later, on-field success, cable viewers in Oregon, Nebraska, New York or anyplace else that TBS reached had the potential to grow to be Braves followers. The group grew to become a childhood default for thousands and thousands of people that had by no means been to Fulton County Stadium or set foot anyplace near Atlanta.
I can attest to that: I used to be a kind of younger viewers who grew to become a Braves diehard because of Turner’s large media swing. It’s not typically you hear of somebody from Long Island, the coronary heart of each Yankees and Mets nation, rooting for an Atlanta group — but there I used to be, each summer season night, mimicking Greg Maddux on the mound whereas standing in entrance of the household TV.
Turner gave up management of the Braves when Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner in 1996, however he by no means actually left the franchise, remaining a fixture at video games and a beloved determine amongst followers.
“There’s a lot of baseball fans around the country and the world because of what Ted did through TBS,” Dale Murphy, a Braves legend throughout the Nineteen Eighties, just lately mentioned. “Ted should be in the Hall of Fame.”