Nbc Sports Boss Fires Up Fox
Somehow, I just don’t see Rupert Murdoch behind a pushcart.
Counting his money in a luxury box at Dodger Stadium, maybe. But behind a pushcart? Not in Dick Ebersol’s lifetime.
Last week, NBC and ABC pulled out of their Baseball Network deal with the major leagues, and it wasn’t a happy split. Ebersol, the NBC Sports president, and his counterpart at ABC, Dennis Swanson, laid into part-time baseball commissioner Bud Selig pretty good.
While he was on a roll, Ebersol also fired a couple shots at another favorite target, Fox TV, the next likely network home for major league baseball.
Fox didn’t have a prime-time show in the top 50, he said. Last year, the AFC on NBC got better ratings than the NFC on Fox for the first time ever, he said. The first one, not quite true. The second one, true.
Then, he uttered The Pushcart Quote:
“Baseball probably thinks that, like CBS, it has another sucker in Fox to pay big rights fees. But they’re trading the No. 1 and No. 2 networks for a pushcart.”
Now, Fox is mad. It’s one thing to pick on the helpless Selig. It’s quite another to pick on the multimillionaire Murdoch and his TV network, which has a full-time “commissioner” in savvy CEO Chase Carey.
“For me, he’s upped the ante,” Carey warned. “I only know Dick Ebersol casually, but it’s apparent from reading about him that he spends as much time manipulating his profile through the press as he does anything else.
“I’ve had at least four people come up to me the last week or so, powerful men in various businesses, asking me why NBC is preoccupied to the point of paranoia with Fox. There’s only one reason someone would become so preoccupied and paranoid and try to take these kinds of shots,” Carey said.
“They’re afraid.”
Carey pointed out that while NBC did win the regular-season ratings race last year in the NFL, 12.5-12.1, Fox had a 34.2 rating for its NFC championship game, the highest-rated non-Super Bowl game since January, 1982. Fox’s playoff games averaged 24.5 to 23.7 for NBC, and Fox’s pregame show also was more watched than NBC’s, 5.3-4.4 in their head-to-head half hour.
And, by the way, “Beverly Hills 90210” slipped in at 46th last season, giving Fox one top 50 show.
“Look at their facts. It’s such a distortion, and Dick Ebersol knows it,” Carey said. “To their credit, NBC had what probably was a better series of games in the AFC than we did in the NFC. That’s the nature of sports.
“But what we’re really talking about is the ability to promote a sport, give it a lift, give it energy. Who did the best job of promoting the NFL, creating a profile, creating extra interest? The general public’s perception in any research study you want to look at will say the company that brought a real kick to the NFL was Fox,” Carey said.
Carey said he believes Fox “can give the same sort of life and kick” to baseball. With the sport’s audience growing old, Fox’s young viewers might be just what baseball needs, if it isn’t too late.
Officially, The Baseball Network can’t be disbanded until Aug. 15. That gives Fox about three weeks to plan its presentation. For now, about all Fox can say is, it’s interested.
Outtakes
These are just good guesses, mind you, but here are some things you might expect from Fox if it gets baseball.
Joe Buck, son of longtime baseball broadcaster Jack Buck, will team with somebody who’s not Tim McCarver as Fox’s lead announce team. Buck is young and already works for Fox, as do Dick Stockton and Thom Brennaman, two baseball veterans who could work on backup teams. James Brown would be the studio host. Why not? He already does football and hockey, and does them well.
Fox would do a Game of the Week every week of the season, probably on Saturday afternoons, regionalizing a half dozen games or less. In return for the weekly exposure, baseball would have to grant Fox a window of exclusivity.
Fox would probably have to regionalize baseball’s wild-card playoffs. There are just too many games. But you can bet Fox wouldn’t regionalize the league championship series, as The Baseball Network intends to do.
And, for its young audience, watch for some gnarly graphics, an on-screen scoreboard with a video-game look, and earlier postseason starting times so games end the same day they start.