Long before the launch of the YES Network, before Fox got into baseball ownership, even before the Tribune Co. and Ted Turner built cable channels on the shoulders of the Chicago Cubs and Atlanta Braves, the Columbia Broadcasting System spent $11.2 million for an 80 percent stake in the New York Yankees.
The reasons that drove CBS to make that purchase in 1964 were similar to those that later would guide Fox to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers. Among them: the belief that if you were going to pay exorbitantly for broadcast rights, you may as well buy the team.
The results would be similarly disappointing.
When it agreed to buy the Yankees in August 1964, CBS was pushing to diversify its holdings. It had turned a $41 million profit in 1963 and needed to find ways to get cash off its books. It already had blanketed the country with 250 affiliates. It owned five stations outright, the most allowed by federal law.
So CBS turned its attention to entertainment properties, investing in Broadway shows and, eventually, the Yankees.
On Nov. 15, 1964, inside an issue that explored the leadership void left by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the New York Times Magazine also looked at why CBS would want to buy a ballclub.
Michael Burke, the vice president in charge of acquisitions for CBS who later would serve as a Yankees president and a partner with George Steinbrenner, said the key to any CBS purchase was its "compatibility" with the network's other holdings. To make sense, Burke said, an acquisition had to be "compatible with our own special skills and knowledge. ... In other words, it should be related to show business or sports or education and the like."
CBS already had invested heavily in sports programming, agreeing to pay $31.8 million to broadcast NFL games over the coming two years. NBC had MLB deals for the Game of the Week and the World Series, so CBS was looking for a foothold in baseball. With Yankees rights fees said to be priced at $500,000 a year, the network figured it may as well buy the team.
Like its successors, Fox and Disney, CBS soon found that managing a ballclub and managing its programming required different sets of skills.
When CBS bought the Yankees, the team had been to the World Series 14 of the previous 16 years. In eight seasons under CBS' stewardship, they would finish as high as second only once, and worse than fourth five times. Attendance at Yankee Stadium fell below 1 million for the first time since 1945.
At the January 1973 press conference at which Steinbrenner was announced as the new owner, Burke explained the network's exit.
"I think CBS suffered some small embarrassment in buying a club at its peak and then having it fall from first place in the league to sixth and then 10th," said Burke, whom Steinbrenner would fire after one year. "The bottom fell out. The Yankees no longer fit comfortably into CBS' plans."
