Continuing the trend of prominent sports television events migrating to cable, Major League Baseball has agreed to move one of its League Championship Series to TBS for the next seven years.
While network executives declined to publicly comment on how much TBS will spend per LCS, sources said the deal is around $45 million per season over the life of the seven-year contract.
In July, Turner – which includes TBS and TNT – became the home of all the divisional-round playoff games starting next season. Now, it also owns an LCS.
“The economics were what we wanted,” said Commissioner Bud Selig, while also citing the continuity of having the divisional series and an LCS on the same network.
Fox will continue to broadcast one LCS and the World Series. Fox and TBS will alternate broadcasting the ALCS and NLCS’. ESPN no longer will have postseason games.
With all of baseball TV deals now completed, sources said MLB will rake in more than $3 billion in rights fees over the next seven years. It is an 18 percent increase over its previous TV deals.
At the end of June, The Post first reported that MLB was in serious negotiations to put LCS games on TBS.
The deal took nearly three months to complete because baseball had discussions with several other outlets, including ESPN. ESPN was unwilling to match the dollars Turner offered.
Sources said MLB also had significant talks about uniting with the NFL Network, which would have presented a clear challenge to ESPN’s all-sports supremacy. Ultimately, there were too many complications to complete the colossal deal.
While TBS and TNT are not all-sports networks, they do have more major postseason sports matchups than anyone else. While ESPN spends $1.1 billion per year on Monday Night Football, it has only 35 to 40 NBA playoff games between ABC and ESPN. Turner has 40 to 45 NBA postseason games and now 20 to 25 baseball playoff games.
Turner Sports President David Levy said having a strong presence is a must. While he would not comment on specifics, the network already has spoken with the representatives for Cal Ripken Jr. and Mark Grace.
As part of its previous agreement, TBS will also broadcast a Sunday game of the week starting in 2008.