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Einhorn and Jerry Reinsdorf are swarmed after the Chicago White Sox won the 2005 World Series.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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Einhorn shares a moment in 2006 with Tony La Russa and Ozzie Guillen.
Photo by: AP IMAGES
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Eddie Einhorn, who died Feb. 24 at the age of 80, was a sports media pioneer, celebrated by some of the legends in sports business for a career that orchestrated the earliest regional sports networks and league-owned channels.
Bulls and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf referred to Einhorn, his friend of nearly 60 years, as the “architect of baseball’s first billion-dollar TV contract” in the early 1980s. Former NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol called Einhorn “the father of American sports syndication.” And former Fox Sports chairman David Hill simply described him as a “media savant.”
Reinsdorf saw Einhorn’s visionary approach early on while the two were Northwestern Law School students. Reinsdorf watched as Einhorn, operating out of a phone booth in the hall of their dorm, bought radio rights for the 1958 NCAA Tournament and sold them to stations across the country.
He graduated from Northwestern two years later but did not take the bar exam, Reinsdorf recalled. That’s because Einhorn’s father died suddenly, and he felt compelled to take over his dad’s insurance business. After a few years in insurance, Einhorn decided to move into TV, Reinsdorf said.
Einhorn used the same model that was successful in radio with television, setting up the TVS Television Network by buying rights to several college conferences and selling the games to local broadcast stations.
“He had to go out and clear stations and find the sponsors,” Reinsdorf said. “It was pretty gutsy. When basketball became popular and the networks started carrying games, he knew that he couldn’t exist so he sold his company.”
When Reinsdorf bought the White Sox in 1981, he reached out to his longtime friend to become part of the ownership group. Reinsdorf said he wanted to tap into Einhorn’s media savvy because he recognized how important television was to sports.
What followed was a series of the most forward-thinking media deals in the business. In 1982, a year after Reinsdorf took control of the White Sox, Einhorn set up Sportsvision, a regional sports network jointly controlled by the White Sox, Bulls, Blackhawks and the NASL’s Sting. The service cost about $20 per month, but since Chicago had not been wired for cable, it lost money and was sold. Reinsdorf said the channel was “a little ahead of our time” but it provided a blueprint for future RSN deals once the cable TV industry matured.
“Eddie understood what was going to happen in the cable world long before 99.5 percent of the sports industry did,” Hill said. “He was a pioneer. He was a legend.”
It wasn’t long before Major League Baseball tapped into Einhorn’s media knowledge and used him to negotiate its national television contracts. In 1983, Einhorn was MLB’s lead negotiator on a deal that saw ABC and NBC pay $1.2 billion over six years — the sport’s first billion-dollar media contract. Five years later, he was part of the negotiating team that signed a four-year, $1.8 billion deal with CBS and a four-year $400 million deal with ESPN.
Former NBC Sports President Ken Schanzer, who represented NBC in those 1983 negotiations, remembered Einhorn as being meticulously prepared, always ready with a solution whenever talks hit a snag.
“He was constantly coming up with these new ways of doing stuff — not all of which were easily articulatable,” Schanzer said. “He was one of the best negotiators I ever knew because any time you did anything with him, he never, ever, ever got to a place in which he couldn’t move in a different direction.”
The CBS deal was a money-loser for the network, though. By the end of the deal in 1993, CBS made it clear that it would not renew. That was when Einhorn came up with the idea of The Baseball Network, a league-owned entity that would air games on ABC and NBC. The venture launched in 1994, the same year MLB suffered through a debilitating work stoppage, forcing cancellation of the World Series. The Baseball Network did not make it past the strike.
In 2009, MLB launched its own MLB Network channel, using some of the same strategies Einhorn espoused 15 years earlier with The Baseball Network.
In the week following his death, one of the main threads Einhorn’s friends and colleagues discussed was about how nice he was. Some of sports business’ most influential figures were more impressed by the content of Einhorn’s character than his business acumen.
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Einhorn (left) and Reinsdorf meet the press in 1981 after their purchase of the White Sox.
Photo by: AP IMAGES
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“In a world in which a lot of owners have sharp elbows, his elbows had adhesive tape,” said Red Sox chairman Tom Werner. “You always wanted to stick near him. He couldn’t have been a more positive, kind, creative guy.”
Einhorn’s kindness is what former baseball executive Tim Brosnan recalls most fondly. Brosnan first met Einhorn in the basement of the O’Hare Hilton at the end of 1990, when Brosnan first interviewed for a baseball job. Brosnan badly wanted to work in the sport that he loved and had spent the better part of a decade reaching out to the baseball’s executives for an opening.
When he finally landed that 1990 interview in Chicago, Brosnan was nervous, and it showed. Brosnan remembered how Einhorn tried to put him at ease at the beginning of the interview.
“I will never forget how nervous I was, how intimidated I was and how kind Eddie was,” Brosnan said. “That’s how Eddie lived his life — from his heart. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”
Nice guys, though, don’t always make good negotiators. But this represents another area where Einhorn proved to be different. He spent his career charming the same sports media executives who he was convincing to spend billions of dollars.
“He was the most flexible, imaginative, creative guy with whom I ever sat across the table,” Schanzer said. “He would throw out an idea, and if you didn’t buy it, he would immediately be able to move in a slightly different direction. He had one of the most facile and agile minds with which I have ever dealt.”
