In the early days of baseball on television, Cardinals owner Fred Saigh was one of the first to go dialing for dollars.
Seventy years ago, in November 1952, Saigh tried to get a form of revenue sharing started among National League franchises regarding broadcast rights fees.
To Saigh, baseball’s television audience was an extension of the ballpark audience, and he wanted a split of the television money that home teams were getting for broadcasting Cardinals road games.
If Saigh was denied a share of those television revenues, he threatened to unplug the broadcasts.
On the air
The first televised major-league game was Aug. 26, 1939, when New York’s NBC station aired the Reds versus the Dodgers from Brooklyn, but it wasn’t until after World War II ended that TV sets became widely available and more affordable to mass markets.
The first television station in St. Louis, and the 13th in the United States, was KSD-TV, Channel 5. A NBC affiliate, the station was owned by Pulitzer Publishing, also the owners of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Pulitzer became the first to own both a newspaper and a television station.
(In 1979, when Pulitzer sold the station, its call letters were changed to KSDK.)
KSD-TV began broadcasting on Feb. 8, 1947, with a 90-minute local information afternoon program. In one of the program’s segments that day, Post-Dispatch sports editor J. Roy Stockton interviewed Cardinals catcher and future broadcaster Joe Garagiola.
The KSD-TV studio was located with the Post-Dispatch building on Olive Street in St. Louis. According to the station, the newspaper’s press operators also handled the studio lights. Sometimes, when needed to put out the latest edition of the afternoon paper, they’d leave the studio, delaying the start of a local program.
Show time
KSD-TV management recognized immediately the potential audience and advertising value of baseball programming, and entered into agreements with the Browns of the American League and the Cardinals of the National League to televise some of their games.
The first televised games in St. Louis were KSD-TV broadcasts of two Browns versus Cardinals exhibitions at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis on April 12-13, 1947, just before the start of the regular season.
KSD-TV also broadcast the Browns’ season opener against the Tigers on April 15 in St. Louis, and the Cardinals’ home opener against the Cubs on April 18.
From then on, Browns and Cardinals games in 1947 were a programming staple on KSD-TV.
Rights and wrongs
Sam Breadon, who made the deal with KSD-TV for the Cardinals, sold the club to Robert Hannegan and Fred Saigh in November 1947. Hannegan died in 1949, leaving Saigh as majority owner.
Saigh had no options in negotiating a local TV deal for the Cardinals. By 1952, St. Louis had 372,000 TV sets but still only one television station, KSD-TV. According to The Sporting News, the franchises reaping the most in broadcast rights fees then were all in New York _ the Yankees ($500,000), Giants ($375,000) and Dodgers ($300,000).
Baseball had no unified television policy then. “Each team signs private agreements with the others, giving the home club permission to televise the games,” Saigh explained to The Sporting News.
In the summer of 1952, a Cardinals versus Giants series became a flashpoint for a broadcasting battle.
“We signed an agreement permitting the Giants to televise our games at the Polo Grounds in New York,” Saigh told The Sporting News, “but were turned down by the Giants when we asked to televise our games in New York back to St. Louis. Our reaction was to prohibit the Giants from televising our two remaining games in New York. The Giants said they would televise anyway. So we threatened to keep our team off the field. The commissioner (Ford Frick) stepped in and warned us that these games would be forfeited if our team failed to take the field.”
Saigh stewed about what he viewed as bullying by the Giants to control broadcast revenue, and was determined to fight back.
Show me the money
In November 1952, Saigh said he would seek compensation from the Giants for the two home games they televised without the Cardinals’ permission.
Saigh also said he would refuse to allow any team to televise a Cardinals road game in 1953 unless the home club agreed to share its broadcast revenue with the Cardinals. At that time, a home club received all revenue from its telecasts.
“Saigh proposed to the National League that television and radio revenues be regarded as part of the gate receipts and that visiting clubs be cut in on these funds as they had been on the box-office takes,” The Sporting News reported.
Predictably, most team owners called Saigh’s idea “socialism,” The Sporting News noted.
One exception was maverick Browns owner Bill Veeck, who usually was in conflict with Saigh in competing for a chunk of the St. Louis baseball market. Veeck supported Saigh’s suggestion that visiting teams share in the broadcast revenue. “It is odd to find Veeck and Saigh on the same side of any campaign, but they are fighting for a split of the TV and radio money,” The Sporting News reported.
Saigh suggested a visiting team get 30 percent of a home team’s broadcast revenue, or 50 percent when the home team was the Giants or Dodgers.
Meet the new boss
Saigh succeeded in changing some minds. The Cubs and Reds agreed to share broadcast revenues with the Cardinals. The Phillies were close to joining in, too, the Associated Press reported.
Owners of the Giants and Dodgers “were aghast” and showed “no intention of backing down on their determination not to pay Saigh a dime for permitting the telecasts of Cardinals games at their parks,” The Sporting News reported.
Saigh had a bigger problem than broadcast revenue rights. On Jan. 28, 1953, he was sentenced to 15 months in prison and fined $15,000 for federal income tax evasion. Unable to keep the team, he apparently considered an offer from buyers who wanted to move the franchise to Milwaukee, but sold the Cardinals to St. Louis brewery Anheuser-Busch, which was run by Gussie Busch
Eager to ingratiate himself into the old boys network of club owners, Busch reversed the revenue sharing stance of Saigh. Busch said he would not demand a share of TV revenue for any Cardinals road game televised by a home club. “Anything we can do to bring the game to more and more people, we hope to be able to do,” Busch told The Sporting News.
Busch had a business reason for his decision. He viewed televised baseball games as an outlet for pitching Anheuser-Busch products to a broad audience. “Under the new ownership, Cardinals television will become a vital asset,” Dan Daniel wrote in the New York World-Telegram and Sun.
Learning to share
In 1966, Major League Baseball sold its first national television package, netting $300,000 per team.
Soon after the players’ strike in 1994, the capitalists who own Major League Baseball and its franchises entered into a comprehensive revenue sharing arrangement. It eventually included the evenly split sharing of revenue from sources such as broadcasts, merchandising and Internet.
Baseball socialism wasn’t so bad, management discovered. In 2022, each team got $110 million from revenue sharing.