TBS readies for year two of postseason-baseball deal

Early-afternoon rain in New York last Sunday turned TBS’ usual 30-minute pregame Major League Baseball show into a 90-minute telethon of statistics and playoff predictions.

But it also was practice for host Ernie Johnson Jr. and studio analysts Cal Ripken Jr. and Dennis Eckersley , who were together on the Turner Sports set in Midtown for just the second time. The three — forced to stall until a pivotal New York Mets and Florida Marlins’ matchup began — are TBS’ faces for the postseason, which starts Wednesday.

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Joey Ivansco/jivansco@ajc.com

Host Ernie Johnson (from left) and analysts Dennis Eckersley and Cal Ripken prepare for TBS’ baseball pregame show in the network’s Midtown studios.

This is the second year of TBS’ baseball deal, which gives it TV rights to the entire first round of the playoffs and one of the two league championships. The package also involves airing an exclusive national telecast and the studio show on Sunday afternoons during the regular season.

TBS reportedly is paying $70 million per year over seven years for its piece of the MLB rights. Fox and ESPN are MLB’s other television partners.

The deal has raised the profile of TBS as well as built on the Turner Sports empire. Turner can promote shows on TBS and sister network TNT, both of which tout original programming that’s competitive with the big broadcast networks. It can also advance the upcoming NBA season and “Inside the NBA,” which air on TNT.

“We definitely learned that the postseason is really important for the network,” said Jenny Storms, senior vice president for sports marketing and programming for Turner Sports.

“In today’s television marketplace, sports and big-ticket sports properties are really a calling card right now,” said Ben Grossman , editor in chief of Broadcasting and Cable magazine. “For TBS to grab baseball I think is a great strategy. It didn’t come cheaply, but if you’re trying to build TBS out in a cluttered cable world, those are the deals you have to make.”

TBS landed the MLB television package in the spring of 2007, but there was no game-of-the-week to serve as a warm-up for the postseason telecasts. All it had was the All-Star Selection Show, which Ripken and Johnson did along with fellow Hall-of-Famer Tony Gwynn.

Regardless, TBS’ coverage of the Division Series round fared well in the ratings, up 26 percent over those shown on Fox and ESPN in 2006.

Some the factors that play into those ratings, however, are out of the network’s control, Grossman pointed out.

“The ratings for the big market teams are always going to be much higher,” he said. And, series that are decided early aren’t good from a a business standpoint, because they fetch less advertising revenue.

“Sweeps are terrible,” Grossman said. “You lose money on deals.”

Some of the reviews weren’t that nice: The New York Times called play-by-play voice Chip Caray’s work on a Yankees-Indians game “packed with errors and silly strategy,” for example.

Turner Sports executive producer Jeff Behnke said he was pleased with last year’s show: It did well in the ratings and got the network’s name and face out there. This year, he said, the analysts need to keep covering the stories that are on the field and make sure viewers know who the players are.

“We came in to a white-hot scenario: All of the lights were on, and all of the attention was on TBS,” Behnke said. “We thought we were very ready last year, but we’re enormously ready this year.”

The pregame and postgame shows’ producers are hoping to build on last year’s momentum. They are also taking advantage of the network’s Sunday games to become more familiar with teams other than the Atlanta Braves — the longtime Turner staple before this year — and their opponents, said Tim Kiely, coordinating producer.

Kiely’s strategy is simple: find people who can talk about baseball and can forget that a TV camera is following them.

“You have to take chances on guys and hope some of them have the personalities to do it,” Kiely said. “Your rocks have to be the guys who can handle themselves in front of the camera.”

For TBS, that rock last year was Ripken, Kiely said. He also placed veteran announcer Johnson, who won two Emmys on TNT’s NBA studio show, as the show’s host. Eckersley was added this year because he blended well with Ripken, Kiely said.

“I push them to remember those kinds of stories and those kinds of ways of personalizing it: what did it smell like, what did it taste like. And then you have the right person to deliver it, without putting the person to sleep.”

After that, Kiely steps away.

“I’m not a big believer in finding out what the fan wants,” Kiely said. “I think you put on the best show, and the market will tell you whether you are doing well or not.”