Winning dollars, if not hearts

Major League Baseball executives have long spoken of their “greatest blessing and greatest curse,” a level of public expectation they believe places the sport under much greater scrutiny than other pro leagues. Japanese fans hold tickets for an exhibition game ...

Tags: This Week's News

ESPN tries to bolster mobile unit

ESPN executives are planning to change elements of Mobile ESPN’s marketing and content after a bumpy beginning to the network’s high-dollar wireless venture. ESPN has dropped the price of its phones and started offering a low-end service plan. Those plans c ...

Tags: This Week's News

New stat for fantasy: More than 6M players

Major fantasy baseball publishers are predicting that the total number of players will spike beyond 6 million users this season, up from about 5 million last year. Opening Day may be weeks away, but fantasy is in full swing at MLB.com and other sites. T ...

Tags: Marketing and Sponsorship

ESPN pulls fee for ‘SportsCenter’ downloads

ESPN last week quickly removed the $1.99 fee for its “SportsCenter” commercials sold on Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes after a fervent wave of negative user feedback. iTunes users chuckled at the commercials, but balked at paying $2 for each download. Digital ...

Cuba crisis settled: Classic open for business

Major League Baseball’s corporate deal-making for the upcoming World Baseball Classic is off and running now that the event’s Cuba crisis has been resolved. MLB executives for weeks held back making any business announcements on the debut tournament, scheduled for March 3-20, until it re ...

Tags: Other News

MLB expects less drama in next labor deal

Major League Baseball will pursue far less reaching economic reforms in its next labor deal compared to prior negotiations with the MLB Players Association, Commissioner Bud Selig said last week. MLB gained extensive increases to revenue sharing and luxury tax provisions in its 2002 ...

Tags: Labor and Agents

Yahoo! launches original-content drive, hires editor

Yahoo! Sports is rolling out a series of original content initiatives aimed at taking on industry stalwarts ESPN.com and CBS SportsLine.com. The company recently hired Dave Morgan, formerly deputy sports editor at the Los Angeles Times, as its executive editor, and with his arrival will ...

Samson steers Marlins toward a new home

The long-term future of the Florida Marlins, unstable for nearly every day of their 13-year existence, will likely be known by the end of the 2006 MLB season, according to team president David Samson. Samson, in a wide-ranging interview at the MLB owners meetings earlier this month ...

New-look Pass: NBA extends out-of-market package onto the Interne ...

The NBA this week will begin offering its League Pass out-of-market TV package on the Internet, the second major initiative this month highlighting the league’s fast-growing fascination with broadband video. The move, arriving in conjunction with the typical half-year League Pass subscri ...

Making signs a one-man show

ANC Sports Enterprises, one of the key progenitors of arena fascia and rotational signage, has developed a new software product that lets all the digital signage systems of a facility be controlled through one console. ANC’s software lets one console run all video ...