Baseball in the late 1970's....Hot off the bird

[retrothoughts]

During the mid-1970's, WTOG-44 in the Tampa Bay area showed Atlanta Braves baseball...that was, until Ted Turner, whose Channel 17 in Atlanta televised the Braves, bought that team and moved it from "regional syndication" to the fledgling medium of cable TV.

Channel 44 then decided to invest in a satellite dish and, by 1978, negotiate with such Major League Baseball teams as the Mets, Reds, Phillies, Pirates, Tigers and Red Sox [and eventually, the Yankees] to televise selected games "hot off the bird."

How hot were they? Channel 44's dish picked up what could be called a "clean feed" of the games, without graphics or other visuals. The teams' originating TV stations inserted their own graphics in their control rooms, but Channel 44 had no CG [character generator] in their control room back in '78, and they couldn't afford to turn on a camera and use hand-made graphics, so viewers were stuck with the clean feeds.

The experiment continued until about 1982 or so, with Channel 44 eventually adding its own CG graphics in 1980. Channel 44 also produced its own title sequence, using such commercially available music as Jean-Luc Ponty's 1975 recording "Is Once Enough?" and Giordio Moroder's music from the 1979 movie Midnight Express for their themes.

What Channel 44 did in those pre-Devil Rays days was quite novel, and it provided a service for the transplants from up north before cable caught on. Have there been other pre-cable "hot off the bird" instances elsewhere?

 

[oldiesfan6479]

The teams' originating TV stations inserted their own graphics in their control rooms...

WGN-TV Chicago was still doing this on Cubs games in the mid-1980s--including
home games at Wrigley--and the production values suffered as a result.

You'd see a name ID font over a close-up of the batter, then the game site would
cut to another shot and the font would still be hanging there.

Going into a break, the station would squeeze the remote video down to quarter screen
over a blue background, then the score stats font would pop in. (Apparently their production control switcher didn't even have an upstream keyer!)

Things got much better when the remote truck acquired its own electronic graphics gear.

But the one thing that torqued me off the most about the game production then...and I know Arne's gone now and can't respond, but...on every play at the plate you'd have the medium-to-wide high shot from behind the plate following the runner in, then just as he gets to the plate they'd cut to a low-level sideline camera close-up shot which completely destroyed the perspective--you couldn't make out where the plate was or if the runner appeared to be safe or out.

 

[FreddyE1977]

I suspect that was a unique situation that worked in Tampa only because all of those teams you mentioned hold their
Spring Training in the Tampa area. Phoenix might have been the only other market where this was likely
viable. (If you own a station in Macon, GA, there is not likely much of a market for Milwaukee Brewers
games off of the bird.)

I do recall though seeing an interesting news clip in the late 80's, about the Central American nation of Belize.
They had never had television, until some local guy set up a dish and a 50W relay transmitter, and
became the local pirate broadcaster. One of his main programming choices was Chicago Cubs baseball
off of WGN. According to the story, they achieved a fanatical following in Belize, causing sudden huge
demand for Cubs hats, t-shirts, etc. Supposedly this was upsetting the government because being such
a poor country, having this sudden surge of demand actually was having a negative impact on their balance
of trade!

 

[bhayes1016]

There was another station in Florida that was doing this as recently as the early 90s, they had to stop when the Marlins franchise started playing. I remember reading about this in USA Today.