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By Root 2444 0

particularly difficult, the value of the baseball contract at that time had to be measured in other ways. The combination of the NFL deal and the MLB deal meant that ESPN had attained a virtually unassailable lead in cable sports. The NFL deal was incredibly important on its own; when combined with the baseball deal, it meant that all other competitors in the cable universe were severely disadvantaged, now and for the foreseeable future. You want to compete with ESPN on cable? Fine. Even if you could get a ton of money together, you’d still have to find enough inventory to fill the hours. ESPN now had a burgeoning share of sports programming and of the faithful fans who watch it.

The $400 million, four-year 1989 Major League Baseball deal: Step Number Six in ESPN’s rise to world dominance.

ROGER WERNER:

The first season of baseball on ESPN was nothing but headaches. We had people within the baseball organization arguing about blackouts and game selection and start times and how many appearances per team and everything. There was a huge menu of problems. I was going out to San Francisco to talk with Fay Vincent, who had just recently become baseball commissioner after the tragic death of Bart Giamatti. I remember driving on the lower deck of the Nimitz Freeway and thinking to myself in the back of the limousine that this just doesn’t feel right. I asked the driver to pick a different route.

I had my meeting with Fay, where I asked for help on a variety of issues, then flew back to New York. Got off the plane, got home, flipped on the game from Candlestick, and watched the whole earthquake, saw the Nimitz Freeway pancaked, and was just chilled.

JOE TORRE, Baseball Analyst:

We were way up in the third deck behind home plate at Candlestick, waiting for the game to start. Then they had a flyover, and we felt the vibrations. I had never been in an earthquake before, and I thought that initially it was the vibrations of the jets, because they were really low. But then all of a sudden that vibration didn’t stop and then the second vibration came, and the top deck started moving to my right, and then it just came back. Then the third time it moved I was waiting for it to just go down. It moved a little bit farther to the right, the top deck came back, and then it seemed to stabilize. All of a sudden, everybody started cheering. People who live in California may have experienced this before, but I certainly hadn’t, and it was surreal for me. We were so high up, I could look over the top of the stadium and I started seeing smoke in the Marina area. I turned, saw Boomer, and said, “Boomer, let’s get out of here.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “There’s not going to be a game; let’s get out of here.”

It was during ESPN’s pregame show, at 8:26 p.m. Eastern time, 5:26 Pacific, October 17, 1989, that the rocking and rolling began, and it was then that ABC’s all-star team of Al Michaels, Jim Palmer, and Tim McCarver vanished from view, just as Michaels said, in that brilliantly distinctive voice of his, “I’ll tell you what, we’re having an—” The audio went dead, the screen went black, ESPN was knocked off the air, and it became pretty easy to figure out what that missing word was.

JOE TORRE:

It looked bad. We finally got down and decided the safest place for us to go was probably onto the field. Everybody had lost power except ESPN, and ABC had Al Michaels, who was doing the game, using our feed for their broadcast. We stayed there till about ten o’clock at night doing interviews and reports, but I gotta tell you, it was really weird. It was just about as strange of a situation as I’d ever been in.

CHRIS MYERS:

I was the field reporter and the only one of our bunch who had experienced an earthquake, a minor one, when I lived down in L.A. But this one sounded different and looked different. I remember this vision of the field looking almost like ribbon candy.

BOB LEY:

You heard it before you felt it. I was seated five rows from the top of the stadium—auxiliary press seating—row 17, section 1—and suddenly it all started