, Columnist
Ted Turner’s Blueprint Can Still Save Leagues from Themselves
Making connections.
Photographer: Doug Collier/AFP
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.