The Superstation Effect
I miss Skip Caray.
One of the more overlooked issues with modern baseball is how regional it’s become. The NFL and NBA are national sports. You might root for the local team, but especially in the NFL where the number of games is at a premium, you’re likely watching a lot of other games on Sunday, Monday, and even Thursday that don’t involve your team at all.
This doesn’t seem to be the case with baseball anymore. Local stations have always carried the local team’s games, though they used to only broadcast road games due to the ridiculous blackout rules that MLB still somewhat adheres to. This improved a little with the advent of the regional Fox Sports networks— at least until they sold them to Sinclair and Ballys.
But the Saturday national game of the week doesn’t really matter anymore. It’s not even really a national game nowadays, since Fox usually breaks down its coverage by region. That’s a big difference from how NBC did it when I was a kid.
I loved the game of the week. That was my chance to see teams like the A’s with Rickey Henderson and the Bash Brothers play without the conflict of them going against the Royals. It was also one of my windows to the National League at a time when there was no interleague play.
The Saturday game wasn’t the only opportunity for this kind of viewing either. I’m old enough to remember when Monday Night Baseball on ABC was a thing, and even though ESPN wasn’t the juggernaut it is now, Wednesday and Sunday Night Baseball were still a big deal. They also didn’t just show a mix of Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers back then, if you can believe it.
And sure, the modern Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers are proof that national brands still exist in baseball, and they’ll always have their bandwagon fans. But it’s hard to imagine the Royals ever being household names again like they were in the 70’s and 80’s. Nor is it easy to envision the Oakland A’s being a top draw in the ratings today.
This got me thinking about the last team to truly capture the entire nation’s attention (outside of the previously mentioned Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers, who are pushed down our throats, whether we like it or not), and I think the answer has to be the 90’s Atlanta Braves. And for that, they have to TBS to thank.
TBS has undergone a series of transformations over the years, but kids today have no idea how unique it was back in the 80’s and early 90’s. Maybe I felt this more intensely than my peers who grew up with cable and took it for granted, since we only had rabbit ears in my house.
The only time I got to watch cable as a kid was when I went over to my grandparents’ or cousin’s houses, and this was always a big deal to me. I planned summer sleepovers based on ESPN baseball matchups. I tried to mow my grandpa’s lawn on afternoons when I knew the Cubs were playing on WGN.
WGN, like TBS, also called itself a superstation. I’m not sure what technically qualified a channel to be a superstation, though I suspect it was a local channel that had grown to reach a national audience. TBS (Atlanta) and WGN (Chicago) fit this bill, and each of them aired a ton of baseball games.
Both stations had their charms. WGN’s chief selling point was that the Cubs played most of their home games in the afternoon— Wrigley Field didn’t get lights until 1988. So it was always awesome to have a game to watch during the day. They also occasionally broadcast White Sox games, but that was about all it had to offer a kid like me— though my grandpa certainly appreciated them showing reruns of The Rockford Files.
TBS, on the other hand, was a different animal altogether. They aired Braves games from 1976-2007, but that’s not all they had to offer. They had a little bit of everything, ranging from reruns of Charles in Charge, originals like Captain Planet, and of course, Saturday Night World Championship Wrestling. Ric Flair and the Planeteers? WOOOOOO!
They also operated on Turner Time, which was little more than a cheap gimmick to set itself apart. Instead of starting all their programming at the top or bottom of the hour, like every other channel in the history of television, they started at :05 and :35 after the hour. But hey, it worked. It’s still one of the first things I think about when I remember TBS in that era.
Not the very first thing I think about though. Obviously, that would be the Braves. However, I would divide my experience of watching the Braves on TBS into two distinct periods.
The Braves were a joke when I was first introduced to them in the mid-80’s— perennial doormats at or near the bottom of the NL West every year. Yeah, the Atlanta Braves were in the NL West, but that’s a conversation for another time.
They also had some of the weakest powder blue road uniforms of the era and very little overall talent. The two biggest exceptions to this were Bob Horner and Dale Murphy.
Bob Horner is probably best known these days as a kind of punchline on nostalgic baseball social media. Because of his schlubby look, he could be the poster child for the argument that you don’t have to be a world class athlete to excel at baseball. Except that’s not really accurate at all.
For starters, in his prime he was an inch taller than me (6’1”) and weighed less than I do now. I’m obviously not a world class athlete, and I’m not as skinny as I was in my youth, but I don’t consider myself to be noticeably overweight either.
Secondly, no matter how he may have looked to the casual onlooker, the guy could play. His career was cut short by a shoulder injury during the 1988 season, but here are his career stats:
.277/.340/.499, 218 HR, 685 RBI, .839 OPS, 127 OPS+, 21.8 WAR
A regular 30+ HR guy when healthy, he became the eleventh player in MLB history to hit 4 home runs in a single game in 1986. But in typical fashion for the Braves of that time, he was just the second player to ever do it in a losing effort.
After being screwed over as a free agent by the collusion of the owners following the 1986 season (for which he would later be handsomely compensated), he signed with the Yakult Swallows and became the highest paid player in Japan at the time. Nor was he a one-dimensional player. Advanced defensive stats can be a little sketchy, but his career fielding percentage at the hot corner was .977.
Again, the guy could play. But he was still only the second-best player on those teams. The top spot was undoubtedly Dale Murphy.
Like many, I still have a hard time believing that Murphy is not in the Hall of Fame. Check out his career statline:
A seven-time All-Star and two-time NL MVP (82,83), the chief argument against his HOF candidacy seems to be that his prime was too short. After 1988, his numbers declined significantly, but he still might be the best non-PED connected player not in the HOF. (Apologies to Lou Whitaker, Dave Parker, and Dick Allen, among others. It’s a very subjective topic.)
And he was definitely not the kind of player to use PEDs. A devout Mormon, he was about as wholesome as it gets. For example, he paid for teammates’ dinners on the road as long as they didn’t order any alcoholic drinks.
He also had a real-life Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees moment. (Or Paul O’Neill in Seinfeld moment— pick your reference.) In 1983, he met a young fan who’d lost both hands and a leg when she stepped on a live power line. She asked him if he’d hit a home run for her. Caught off guard, he didn’t know what to do except mumble, “Okay.” Then he went out and hit two dingers. You can’t make that stuff up.
Easily the best Brave since Hank Aaron, my favorite Murphy story doesn’t even directly involve him. It concerns my cousin Philip and a game of baseball in my grandparents’ yard. We always pretended to be real teams and players, and on the overcast day in question we were playing an All-Star Game and Phil came to the plate as Dale Murphy. Before I could throw the first pitch, he leaned on the bat, looked up at the sky, and said, “Looks like it’s gonna rain, boys.”
Instantly, the sky opened up with a deluge of rain. We scrambled inside and probably spent the rest of the afternoon watching a Cubs game on WGN. But to this day, my cousins and I still quote Phil’s faux Dale Murphy any time the sky is dark and cloudy and you can smell an impending storm in the air.
Unfortunately, Murphy was traded to the Phillies before the Braves experienced a dramatic turnaround in 1991. The first winds of change were apparent in 1990 when Bobby Cox took over as manager and David Justice won the NL Rookie of the Year.
But in 1991, the unthinkable happened. The Braves went from worst to first (the first NL team to ever do that) and won the NL West pennant. They then advanced to play the Minnesota Twins in the World Series. Ironically, the Twins had also gone from worst to first in the AL West.
Objectively speaking, the 1991 World Series is the best World Series I’ve ever seen. A seven-game classic that included a number of memorable moments, it is worthy of its own post. And someday it will get it, so I won’t go into great detail about it here.
What I will discuss is the cultural impact that Braves team made. I grew up in rural Kansas, and yet my seventh grade class was obsessed with the Braves that fall. I remember my entire class doing the Tomahawk Chop in the gym that October— cultural insensitivities aside, that was a pretty awesome scene.
The only exception was my friend Seth. I don’t know if he had some previously undisclosed allegiance to the Twins or if he just liked being a contrarian, but he became the class villain for a week or so, especially after he took so much glee in the Twins’ eventual victory.
In a weird coincidence, my son was the same age as I was in 1991 when the Braves surprised a lot of pundits by winning the 2021 World Series. No scene like that took place in his middle school, however.
I’m sure there are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is that Kansas kids (or anybody outside the Atlanta area, for that matter) have no reason to feel connected to the Braves. TBS still carries baseball, but they no longer have any affiliation with the Braves.
They do one national game a week now, and while the quality of their broadcast is high thanks to announcers Brian Anderson and Ron Darling, it’s a far cry from the extensive coverage they presented when I was a kid.
The Braves were on every night, and though they had a wide variety of announcers including Pete Van Wieren (outstanding in his own right), Dave O’Brien, and even Ernie Johnson as a studio host, the two that always stood out to me were Skip Caray and Don Sutton. To me, they were the voices of the Braves, and by extension, two of the leading voices of baseball.
Skip was not as over the top as his dad Harry, who was a national legend calling Cubs games over on WGN, but he was arguably the superior play-by-play announcer. Always quick with a sarcastic quip or wry one-liner, he was brilliant when it came to mocking TBS’s steady stream of B-Movies coming up after the game. (Look up the Squirm incident for verification.) And the steady Sutton, who will always be a starter on my all-time Guys Who Look Way Too Old To Be Active Baseball Players Team, provided a perfect complement to Skip as a color analyst.
Those guys were as important to the promotion of Braves baseball in the 90’s as the core of players who would lead them to one of the most successful decades in MLB history. And it was quite a run, even if they are often perceived as underachievers since they only won one World Series during that span. Jeez, only one world championship— what a disaster!
The face of the Braves’ success was the starting rotation, arguably the best ever assembled. Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Steve Avery were absolutely dominant, but for now I want to shine a brief light on some of the other guys who starred for the Braves in the 90’s. Because they were the type of team we all got to know beyond just the superstars.
I have to start with Dave Justice, who manned RF. His career statline is impressive:
.279/.378/.500, 305 HR, 1,017 RBI, .878 OPS, 129 OPS+, 40.6 WAR
But arguably not as impressive as making my sister sort of care about baseball for a little while. Never much of a fan, she was admittedly far more interested in Justice’s biceps and ass than his on base percentage or slugging numbers, but it’s the only time I’ve ever seen her show the slightest enthusiasm towards sports for any reason, so it’s worth noting.
My personal favorite was Ron Gant— at least until they made the deadline deal in 1993 to acquire the Crime Dog, Fred McGriff.
Gant made a number of questionable decisions during the course of his career, including breaking his leg in an ATV accident prior to the 1994 season, effectively ending his Braves tenure and costing himself a boatload of money, and punching out the great-grandson of Connie Mack in a bar fight before the 1992 season. That said, Connie Mack IV would go on to become a politician, so he probably had it coming.
But none of these incidents should overshadow how important Gant was to the Braves’ success. Atlanta’s LF hit 321 career home runs, and was only the third player in MLB history to join the 30-30 (30 HR & 30 SB) Club in consecutive seasons (‘91 & ‘92), alongside Bobby Bonds (‘77-‘78) and Willie Mays (‘56-‘57). Barry Bonds later became the first to do it three years in a row from 1995-97. No matter how you look at it, that’s pretty good company.
The Braves, especially the teams in the early 90’s, were full of talented, often underrated players. Charlie Leibrandt, a World Series champion with the 1985 Royals, was a staple of the starting rotation until Greg Maddux joined the crew in 1993. He pitched a gem in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series, but was unfortunately outdueled by a legendary performance from Jack Morris.
Terry Pendleton, also a participant in the 1985 Fall Classic (as well as the 1987 World Series, despite being hampered by injuries) with the St. Louis Cardinals, was the 1991 NL MVP for the Braves— a fact that is guaranteed to stump a baseball trivia whiz or two. That’s not to say he wasn’t deserving.
Pendleton’s 1992 stats: .319/.363/.517, 22 HR, 86 RBI, 34 Doubles, .880 OPS, 139 OPS+. He led the league in batting average, hits (187), and total bases (303), and was also an outstanding defender at 3B.
Pendleton eventually gave way to Chipper Jones at 3B, just as Leibrandt was supplanted by Maddux in the rotation, but they were as crucial to the Braves’ success as the even better players who replaced them. The same credit deserves to be extended to other core players like Jeff Blauser, Mark Lemke, Javy Lopez, Ryan Klesko, Mark Wohlers, and Otis Nixon.
And that’s not even mentioning Deion Sanders. How can we discuss the 90’s Braves and not talk about Deion Sanders? But there’s just not enough time. That’s how great those Braves were.
They gave us so many memorable moments, from the 1991 World Series, to two epic NLCS victories over the Pirates, the latter of which (1992) featured the not-so-fleet of foot Sid Bream’s mad dash home to beat Andy Van Slyke’s throw and walk it off in Game 7, one of the most exciting plays I’ve ever witnessed.
Then there was the 1993 NL West pennant race, possibly the last great pennant race before realignment and the Wild Card diminished the importance of a division title. The Braves won the West with 104 wins, edging out San Francisco by a single game on the final day of the regular season and sending the 103-win Giants home for the offseason without a consolation prize.
The culmination came in 1995 when they finally got their elusive championship by defeating the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. They would continue to dominate the NL East for years to come, but coming off the Strike of 1994, their overdue triumph in 1995 was significant.
People often credit the home run chase of 1998 as the event that brought fans back to baseball after the trauma of the Strike. Others, looking for a more wholesome alternative, point to Ripken breaking Gehrig’s Iron Man record in 1995, but I would caution everyone not to overlook the Braves’ title run later that same season. Outside of the Red Sox and Cubs breaking multi-generational championship droughts in 2004 and 2016, I can’t recall another example of the entire country (outside of Cleveland fans, of course) coming together to pull for a single team before or since.
Even bitter fans who’d sworn off baseball for good in the aftermath of the Strike couldn’t help sneaking a peak back at the game they’d once loved in order to see if Atlanta could finally grasp that elusive title. The combined sight and sound of Skip Caray’s call of Marquis Grissom hauling in the final out in center field was surely enough to win some of them back for good.
The 90’s Braves were a dynamic force of baseball nature. They brought together a random middle school class in Kansas, turned my Midwestern, middle-aged aunt into a nightly viewer and super fan, won over my sports-hating sister, built a coast-to-coast following, and did their own small part to save the national pastime. And they did this largely on the shoulders of Superstation TBS.
At a time when baseball is struggling to connect with young fans and our country is as divided as it has ever been since the Civil War, I can’t help but wonder if TBS shouldn’t bring the Braves back. Could it save both baseball and America?
Probably not, but I’m willing to give it a shot.
Thank you for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. Share your memories of the Braves on TBS below in the comments. And if you liked what you read, don’t forget to subscribe and recommend PBN to your baseball fan friends.
I miss Braves baseball on TBS. 7:05 start time. Skip Caray was the GOAT! And Dale Murphy should be in the Hall of Fame. Period.
I absolutely relate to this one. From Horner and Murphy to the 95 title. I have come to realize later in life that Pendleton’s mvp season was incredibly weak. But I’m okay with that. In fact , one could possibly form an argument that he was among the last if not the last to be a true mVp.