Local

American League

National League

Former teams

National

Superstations

Postseason coverage

When the

League Championship Series The League Championship Series (LCS) is the semifinal round of postseason play in Major League Baseball which has been conducted since 1969. In 1981, and since 1995, the two annual series have matched up the winners of the Division Series, an ...

was first instituted in

1969 This year is notable for Apollo 11's first landing on the moon. Events January * January 4 – The Government of Spain hands over Ifni to Morocco. * January 5 **Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701 crashes into a house on its approach to ...

, the Major League Baseball television contract at the time allowed a local TV station in the market of each competing team to also carry the LCS games. So, for example,

Mets The New York Mets are an American professional baseball team based in the New York City borough of Queens. The Mets compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member of the National League (NL) East division. They are one of two major league ...

fans in New York could choose to watch either the

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American English-language commercial broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, its headquarters are l ...

telecast or

Lindsey Nelson Lindsey Nelson (May 25, 1919 – June 10, 1995) was an American sportscaster best known for his long career calling play-by-play of college football and New York Mets baseball. Nelson spent 17 years with the Mets and three years with the San F ...

Bob Murphy Robert, Rob, Bob or Bobby Murphy may refer to: Sports Ice hockey *Robert Ronald Murphy or Ron Murphy (1933–2014), Canadian ice hockey player * Bob Murphy (ice hockey) (born 1951), Canadian retired professional ice hockey player * Rob Murphy (ice ...

and

Ralph Kiner Ralph McPherran Kiner (October 27, 1922 – February 6, 2014) was an American Major League Baseball player and broadcaster. An outfielder, Kiner played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Chicago Cubs, and Cleveland Indians from 1946 through 1955. Foll ...

on WOR-TV.

1983 The year 1983 saw both the official beginning of the Internet and the first mobile cellular telephone call. Events January * January 1 – The migration of the ARPANET to TCP/IP is officially completed (this is considered to be the beginning ...

marked the last time that local telecasts of League Championship Series games were allowed. In 1982, Major League Baseball recognized a problem with this due to the emergence of cable superstations such as WTBS in

Atlanta Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...

and WGN-TV in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

. When TBS tried to petition for the right to do a "local" Braves broadcast of the 1982 NLCS, Major League Baseball got a Philadelphia federal court to ban them on the grounds that as a cable superstation, TBS could not have a nationwide telecast competing with ABC's. Since 2007, MLB playoff games on TBS are not made available to local over-the-air broadcasters in the participating teams' markets.Postseason exclusivity boosted the price for TBS. If MLB continued to allow local outlets to air their team's games, the rights would have been "significantly diluted"
according to Neal Pilson, the former president of

CBS Sports CBS Sports is the sports division of the American television network CBS. Its headquarters are in the CBS Building on W 52nd Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, with programs produced out of Studio 43 at the CBS Broadcast Center on W ...

who now runs a broadcast consulting company. "The TBS sales people now can assure advertisers that this is the only place where people can see the games," Pilson said. "It's a judgment baseball had to make. It had to balance the revenue stream, which is formidable, against the loss of a certain number of homes." Under the previous contract,

ESPN ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). Th ...

was required to make those games available on the air in local markets.

References

External links

MLB Over The Air AffiliatesBaseballChronology.com!MLB LOCAL FLAGSHIPS AND ANNOUNCERS
{{The Baseball Network ABC Sports CBS Sports Fox Sports original programming Major League Baseball on NBC Over-the-air television broadcasters Over-the-air-television broadcasters Over-the-air television broadcasters Local sports television programming in the United States