Adam Minter: Ted Turner’s blueprint can still save leagues from themselves

May 10, 2026 - 9:30 AM

Television viewers outside of Georgia didn’t have many reasons to care about the Atlanta Braves in the mid-1970s. The team was terrible and its games were largely unavailable to anyone whose “rabbit ears” antenna couldn’t pick up an Atlanta signal.

For Ted Turner, who died Wednesday at 87, this wasn’t a baseball problem. It was a television problem. On April 2, 1977, he solved it by using WTCG, his Atlanta “superstation,” to beam Braves games to cable systems across the country.

Within a few years, the Braves went from regional embarrassment to a national presence. The process offered Major League Baseball an important lesson: Grow access to the games and the fans will follow.

Yet nearly half a century later, MLB still hasn’t truly learned from Turner’s insight. Rather than expanding access, baseball is finding new ways to withhold it.

It’s a familiar tactic in the sport. For decades, many team owners viewed radio and television warily, fearing broadcasts would cannibalize the ticket sales that drove revenues. New York-area clubs nearly banned radio altogether in the 1930s. The St. Louis Cardinals suggested a one-year moratorium on television broadcasts two decades later — a sign that even as mass media transformed baseball into a national business, much of the industry continued to treat access as a threat. Bowie Kuhn, who served as MLB commissioner during the 1970s, recalled worrying that “clubs were going to lose fans at the gate and local broadcasting revenues” thanks to the Braves’ national cable innovation.

But Turner understood something that Kuhn and much of baseball didn’t. Fandom is what happens when non-fans casually start watching a sport, night after night.

In the 1980s, the Braves were living proof of this idea. Across the country, viewers with zero connection to Atlanta watched the team simply because they were on. Of course, the baseball-curious needed to buy a cable subscription to tune in. But that was an increasingly common experience in America, and soon it wasn’t just Turner referring to the Braves as “America’s Team.”

This evolution wasn’t just good for the media mogul; it was also good for MLB. Turner brought the Braves — and whoever they were playing — into regions and homes that didn’t previously have regular access to the sport, ranging from Midwestern small towns to the fast-growing Sunbelt. As the map grew, so too did television rights fees. In 1977, the year the Braves went nationwide, MLB television revenue was $52 million. By 1995, the year the team (finally) won the World Series, that figure had increased to $516 million, according to an analysis by the Economic History Association. That growth didn’t happen without baseball’s transformation into a national entertainment property. MLB liked the money Turner’s insight brought, but still grumbled about superstations and their effect on how attractive local games looked.

To address this concern, the league imposed blackout restrictions intended to protect local teams, often to absurd extremes. For example, five teams claim Hawaii as part of their home television territory even though the closest MLB stadium is thousands of miles away. As a result, Hawaiians are blacked out from a significant portion of the MLB season on MLB.TV (a service designed to provide access to every team — in theory) because those games are “local.” Fans must buy a separate subscription carrying a local broadcast to watch those matchups.

The current MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, has said he wants to be “out of the business of blackouts.” I suppose that’s a sign of progress. But even as Manfred plans to untangle one fan-hostile policy, he’s presiding over the establishment of a new one tied to streaming. In recent years, the league has frustrated fans anew by scattering games across cable channels, apps and platforms like Apple TV, Peacock and Netflix. The potpourri of subscriptions required to be a fan challenges patience and pocketbooks.

Baseball is hardly the only sport to adopt this model. The National Basketball Association and the National Football League are apparently determined to emulate MLB’s self-sabotage by assembling their own fragmented collection of streaming apps and exclusive broadcasts.

Some of this is arguably defensible in the social media era. Fans are no longer forged through nightly game broadcasts, alone. Younger fans, in particular, are increasingly coming to sports via highlights, memes and other short media. Many never watch full games at all. As NBA commissioner Adam Silver recently acknowledged, his league already faces a challenge in converting casual online followers into committed viewers. Fragmenting broadcasts across streaming services makes that challenge worse, whether at the NBA or any other major sports association.

Ted Turner understood that challenge decades ago. Though he never had to own a team during the streaming era (he sold off most of his major sports interests in 1996), he built the enduring model for growing a sport. That model made baseball unavoidable. Now MLB seems determined to make it hard to find.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."