By Greg Jones
I have friends in New Mexico who say they're the Atlanta Braves' biggest fans. They're not from Atlanta, or indeed anywhere else in the South. They don't "just like the uniforms." And they didn't follow a favorite player who moved to the Braves. So why do they bust out their "tomahawk chops" every time they see the Braves on TV? Because the Braves are on TV... all the time in New Mexico. Every game.
It's thanks to the Turner Networks, via TBS, "the superstation." TBS has been splashing Atlanta baseball, and basketball, across the country via regional cable operators for a couple of decades. Turner Networks, owned now by Time Warner, has created Braves (and Hawks) fans in every city _ and made billions in the process.
It's open market, laissez-faire capitalism, sports style. It's also the reason most teams (and fans) lose out. Time Warner, along with Fox Entertainment (100% of the L.A. Dodgers, 40% of hockey's New York Rangers, 40% of the New York Knicks, and options to buy stakes in the L.A. Lakers and Kings), Cablevision (60% of the Knicks, 60% of the Rangers, and a proposed family
deal to own 100% of the Cleveland Indians), Walt Disney (100% of the Anaheim Angels, 100% of the Mighty Ducks), Tribune (100% of the Chicago Cubs) and several smaller corporate entities in the United States and abroad have transformed sports franchises into programs that win advertisers instead of teams that win games.
Although some of the teams are successful _ the Knicks and the Braves, for example _ most of their records would seem to indicate that the biggest winning numbers are in their owners' bank accounts.
Media sports conglomerates have the resources and the reach to shove their teams in the face of any viewer in the country. You may not care about the Braves if you live in Bernalillo, New Mexico, but there they are, 162 games a year. And teams that don't live under a big media/entertainment corporate umbrella tend to get very wet. Take baseball's Minnesota Twins, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Montreal Expos. Locally owned, they have three of the lowest payrolls in the league. And they rank among the last in attendance. The last playoff appearance by such a team was in 1992. And, much more importantly, they have no cable distribution deal. And no corporate deep pockets to sign free agent players or managers, or to force cities into sweetheart land and tax deals for new stadiums.
For an entertainment company, transplanting a team is like moving production to a new studio lot. It doesn't matter, as long as the math comes out black. Fans are left with two choices: cough up more money for a new stadium... or watch the Braves/Cubs/Dodgers on TV.
Baseball, basketball, and hockey have been looted and left dying by mega-owners. NFL owners, however, still practice a radical but tenuous form of revenue sharing that allows the smallest market teams to stay competitive on and off the field. But the heavyweight owners _ like Dallas oil baron Jerry Jones who flouted league rules by making separate marketing deals with Nike and American Express; Cleveland's Al Lerner, owner of the Bank of America, the world's largest credit card company; and former Blockbuster Video owner Wayne Huizenga, who broke up a World Series team in Miami (the Florida Marlins) to fatten his bottom line _ complain at owners' meetings that there are still too many restrictions on their practices.
So the question asked increasingly across America should be not what team, but what channel, do you root for?
- Gregory Jones has covered sports in New Mexico, California, and New York as a writer and radio broadcaster.
