Yahoo! Sports plans to use this week's MLB All-Star Game as the latest step in its effort to establish an identity as a sports content provider.
For the past year, Yahoo! Sports has tried to take center stage at major sporting events to increase its visibility. Brian Grey, general manager of Yahoo! Sports, said plans for the All-Star Game call for former major league pitcher and Yahoo! columnist Jack McDowell and part-time Yahoo! contributor and Fox broadcaster Tim McCarver to make the rounds of the assembled radio and television media today and Tuesday as interview subjects.
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| Yahoo! Sports’ status as a White Sox sponsor put it in position for this year’s All-Star Game. |
McDowell's MLB career included time with the Chicago White Sox, host of this year's game.
When not in front of a camera or behind a microphone, McDowell and McCarver will mingle with Yahoo!'s Detroit and Chicago sales staffs and their clients. The Yahoo! network's sales staff and clientele will have a particularly prominent presence at this year's game in light of Yahoo!'s role as a White Sox sponsor — including signs on U.S. Cellular Field's outfield wall.
Meanwhile, Yahoo! Sports' newest online talent, former ESPN anchor Larry Beil, will host a 20- to 30-minute Webcast on Yahoo! Sports, with McDowell and McCarver contributing via satellite. The program, to be available to site users today, will recap the first half of the season, Grey said, and probably will include several MLB players.
The steps together represent a desire by Yahoo! Sports to consistently offer an original element to its stable of sports information, Grey said. That stable features a number of content partnerships with more traditional outlets, including sites for Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News and USA Today.
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| Grey |
"We're trying to get to the place where we're the complete sports experience online," Grey said. "People are starting to recognize we are a complete one-stop shop for everything they're hoping to find when it comes to sports."
The idea of producing Webcasts around major sporting events began for Yahoo! Sports late last year with a college football bowl preview show hosted by Craig James. It continued with a Super Bowl show hosted by Darryl Johnston, Grey said.
The MLB all-star show will be the first of a series hosted by Beil, who will work regularly as a Yahoo! Sports contributor over the next year.
Grey said he originally hoped to leverage Yahoo! Sports' sign presence at U.S. Cellular Field to promote its latest fantasy football product, but he decided to wait until the day after the game to change the outfield signs.
Yahoo! Sports consistently ranks in the top five in traffic among sports Web sites, according to comScore Media Metrix. It ranked fourth among sports sites in May, the most recent period for which monthly numbers were available, with 6.7 million unique U.S. visitors, behind top-ranked espn.com, AOL Sports and SportsLine.com.
