The Detroit Tigers will have another season with none of their games broadcast on free-to-air television. The Detroit News’ Lynn Henning knows who’s to blame.
Believing the Tigers and a local TV station would hook up again in 2006 might have been a bad assumption. Ditto for thoughts that, even if the Tigers and Channel 50 came to another impasse, FSN Detroit would come to the rescue — of the cable audience, anyway — with additional telecasts.
Wrong, and double wrong.
There might be no “free” television in 2006. Likewise, FSN Detroit is picking up no more telecasts in 2006 — 114 — than it did in 2005.
You can put this one on Tigers owner Mike Ilitch.
It is known among informed local TV people that the Tigers and Channel 50 didn’t do business for much the same reasons talks broke down a year ago: negotiations dawdled, and the Tigers were asking for stiff rights-fees, issues which became academic when the Tigers and Channel 50 never talked past some late-autumn 2005 conversations.
This is not a new problem, although it should have been an old one. Other teams and their local media outlets seem always to get business deals tied up in reasonable time and in ways that benefit both parties. Detroit, alas, is a different
The Tigers are notorious for having been latecomers to the table. It was the biggest reason why Channel 50 had to say sayonara a year ago. A television station needs, at some point, to get on with its programming life. Why Ilitch fails, annually, to understand this is hard to fathom.
Channel 50 ran into another dead-end during the offseason. Net result: Those folks who can’t swallow a monthly cable bill — and they are many — can stretch their imaginations and visualize what the field and the players look like as they tune into Dan Dickerson and Jim Price on local radio. That is, assuming you’re in one of those areas where radio reception along the Tigers network isn’t fuzzy or non-existent.
Christ, they make listening to it on the radio sound like being sent to the gulag – radio announcers are considerably more pleasant to hear than yr average FSN play-by-play.
By and large, the quality of Fox Sports play-by-play nationwide is mindblowingly poor. But there is at least one example I can think of where baseball fans are compelled to place television sets on the dashboard of their cars rather than hear the radio call of their favorite team.
And that isn’t because they cannot get enough of Michael Kay, either.
That’s not really it (and in Detroit, the Fox guys aren’t horrendous, IMO. No George Kell and Al Kaline, but not unlistenable). The real shot he’s delivering is that the Tigers made a decision several years ago to move from WJR, which has one of the strongest signals in the nation, to WXYT, which has perhaps the 10th strongest signal in Oakland County.
Getting a radio broadcast these days in Michigan can be spotty, depending upon where you are. People here got used to the idea of being able to hear Harwell et al pretty much anywhere east of the Mississippi, so it’s an adjustment.