It was once the simplest – or, as the robber barons of today say, “frictionless” – broadcast experience: Turn on TBS. Watch the Atlanta Braves.
For baseball fans in the Atlanta area, it was even more basic: Flip the dial to Channel 17. Watch baseball. Become a fan.
Or, eventually, a superfan, thanks to a superstation.
The sports and broadcast world Ted Turner left when he died Wednesday, May 6 at 87 was nothing like the universe he had a large part in constructing as owner of Atlanta’s Braves and Hawks. In the days before his passing, scores of NBA fans were enraged that playoff games – the only ones that really count of the thousands contested a year – were snatched from their standard carriers and placed behind Jeff Bezos’s Prime Video wall.
Wanna watch the Braves nowadays?
Ted Turner throws out the first pitch at the Braves’ new stadium, Turner Field, in 1997.
That will require a subscription to their broadcast and streaming arm, yet you may need Apple TV on occasion, and oh, perhaps Peacock, and with any luck they won’t be plucked for a Netflix game and yes, old-school basic cable might be mandatory should they land on an FS1 national broadcast.
Old man yells at cloud warning: Back in my day, we never needed any of that to see Zane Smith or Rick Mahler get their teeth kicked in by the Mets or Cardinals.
As we gaze upon this atomized and extremely stratified media and entertainment landscape, it is stunning to think that the Braves – the Atlanta Braves! – became a reliable segment of the sports monoculture.
It’s hard to remember in the wake of the 14 consecutive division titles that would come in the 1990s and 2000s, the lone World Series championship in that run landing in 1995, but the Braves were an awful, awful team for a long while.
Between 1975 and 1990, they had just three winning seasons and one playoff berth, losing 89 to 106 games between 1985 and 1990. In that span, Turner went from media rightsholder to owner of the team.
Not that it was easy. The low point likely came in Turner’s second season as owner, when he made an ill-fated attempt to manage the team whle it was mired in a 16-game losing streak. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn put a kibosh on that after one day, claiming individuals with ownership stakes in the club couldn’t manage it.
“They must have put that rule in yesterday,” Turner, then 38, groused.
Eventually, they got it right, even if in real time, the construction job laid out by Bobby Cox and John Schuerholz, and eventually overseen from the dugout by Cox, seemed like a miracle.
Yeah, the Braves got so good you became sick of them. That’s success.
But before then, they were the epitome of baseball comfort food. Nothing on TV in the afternoon? Flip it to TBS and somehow, you’d stick around, even as Skip Caray might have said, “And so that brings on Paul Assenmacher, Atlanta trailing 11-1.”
It forged a concept they now call “Braves Country,” the franchise dominating what’s now a booming part of the nation, from the Carolinas down into SEC territory, uncontested at least until they throw a team in Nashville or Charlotte. Yet you could be on the West Coast and know of this erratic but promising lefty named Tom Glavine. Or in the Upper Midwest, pondering whether that trade for Terry Pendleton really was having an outsize effect on the 1991 squad.
It’s interesting to hear the modern fan bemoan the fact their team’s game – just one game – got snatched up by Apple TV or FS1. Kids, back in the day we’d be lucky to get 50 or 60 of our team’s games on TV, maybe more if your parents or your friends’ parents paid big bucks for a subscription to “SportsChannel” or whatever the very premium all-sports offering was in your area.
Yet there were always the Braves. The Cubs, too, as WGN followed in the superstation model, though their games were typically over or almost over by the time a kid got home from school, thanks to the Wrigley Field factor.
But TBS was everywhere and always had an absolute banger of an afternoon lineup – shows, movies, game shows – as Turner acquired the rights to them all. A glorious library, one best shared with the people.
Less glorious? The Atlanta Hawks, Turner’s NBA entry that still has yet to reach an NBA Finals. Counterpoint: If you’re going to be a television product, never a bad idea to employ a player known as the Human Highlight Film.
As baseball lurches toward a lockout, you wonder what effect Turner might have in the room. As the game stood on the verge of its nuclear winter of 1994-95, Turner gazed upon a landscape still reeling from ownership collusion a few years earlier, and about to take a massive step back by canceling the 1994 World Series.
“Gentlemen,” he famously told his colleagues who enjoyed the antitrust exemption granted by Congress, “we have the only legal monopoly in the country and we are (expletive) it up.”
Those same owners would follow Turner’s lead, establishing regional sports networks, many of them team-owned, as baseball revenues zoomed to stratospheric levels, to the point that the San Diego Padres are now a $4 billion property.
Yet Turner was the first one in, enjoying a national imprint for a ballclub he bought for $500,000 in 1976. Along the way, he changed the way we view sports, his eponymous networks still a presence in our daily diet.
The landscape is a lot more cluttered now – much of it Turner’s doing, unwittingly or not. He essentially invented the 24-hour news cycle with CNN, which spawned Fox News, a 30-year spiral of disinformation that’s only deepened in time.
Basic cable once was a highly affordable utility, yet became so prohibitive in cost – thanks in large part to lobbying efforts that killed any chance at an a la carte option viewers would have appreciated – that it eventually opened the door for streaming.
And now, here we are, needing an abacus to see who’s broadcasting what while sports leagues sign up any desperate media entity willing to pay a billion dollars for live sports inventory.
Alas. Turner’s vision might have tipped this snowball down the mountain, and no entity is powerful enough to stop it.
But for generations of fans who leaned on Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz as their Larry, Moe and Curly, his vision was perfect.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Ted Turner made Atlanta Braves America’s sports team on TBS as owner
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