On The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz: The Big Suey podcast on Friday, Le Batard talked with former ESPN president and current Meadowlark Media CEO John Skipper and former Marlins president and current CBS Sports analyst David Samson about some of the big issues in sports. During the podcast, Samson brought up that he felt — when he was with the Marlins — SportsCenter spent more time on events they had the rights to.
“There’s a direct correlation between the number of minutes SportsCenter would spend on sports that they held the rights to versus the sports they didn’t. Literally a direct correlation.
“I can go through where MLB was in SportsCenter because we would monitor it and when you guys dropped Baseball Tonight or when ESPN would add a Sunday night game…What about hockey? Where was hockey on SportsCenter until the rights went to ESPN and all of a sudden you hire Barry Melrose.”
Samson mentioned that MLB would do a detailed study of where teams were on nightly SportsCenters and which block of the show certain teams would be featured in.
“We would study this. We would know exactly where on SportsCenter the highlights were, which teams were getting highlights and how often, what block they were in, what minute of the block they were in.”
Skipper denied the accusation from Samson and he brought up when ESPN did not have hockey, they had to take a different approach to covering the sport.
“It’s not true. We lost hockey when I was there and we got accused that hockey never shows up anymore. Hockey highlights were very close to the same on SportsCenter when we had it and didn’t have it. The only difference was you would use SportsCenter as a marketing tool so you would go to the arena and say hey, there’s Barry Melrose on the ice. We had a game coming up. ‘Barry, tell us about what we are going to see.’ That was different. But, when the Rangers played the Bruins, we still had the highlight on and nobody ever said don’t put the highlights on.”
In fact, even when Skipper wanted to get more highlights of women’s sports on ESPN, he told Le Batard that nobody at the company went through with that idea.
“The only time I ever said you must put more highlights on was I said we need more women’s highlights. I’m telling you that you must put more women’s highlights on and by the way, they didn’t listen to me. They didn’t do it. Every league makes the assumption that ESPN buries the leagues they aren’t in business with. It’s just not true.”
One call that Skipper would get sometimes was from former MLB commissioner Bud Selig saying there was not enough MLB coverage on a particular show.
“I used to actually get calls from the Commissioner, Mr. Selig would be up in the morning watching Mike and Mike and he would call me saying not enough baseball today. I know you were paying attention, but I never instructed people to put more highlights of games that we had on-the-air….They take pride in doing the show without regards to the ESPN business.”
