Ted Turner, the media tycoon who died Wednesday, had a unique business sense that led him to (among other things) create America’s first 24-hour cable news channel, establish the concept of a “superstation” and pocket many billions of dollars.
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It also led him to the dugout of the Atlanta Braves, where, on May 11, 1977, Turner — who owned the team — decided to become its manager.
And while that move was ridiculed across baseball at the time, another decision Turner made — far more consequential but no less revolutionary — put his franchise on a trajectory to become one of the most popular in the sport. For three decades, his Braves would appear in living rooms coast-to-coast as he broadcast their games nationally on the Turner Broadcasting System, or TBS.
John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball, told NBC News that Turner’s move brought new life to a franchise that had already relocated two times and came at a time when owners were reluctant to broadcast too many of their teams’ games.
“Baseball owners, beginning in the 1920s, had been reluctant to air their games on radio. Next, they viewed TV as a threat, limiting the number of games broadcast until the 1951 playoffs were televised nationally,” Thorn said. “Ted Turner not only shared all of Atlanta’s 162 games, thus addressing his station’s need for programming, but also revived the dormant Braves to become America’s franchise.”
The Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966 and, aside from Henry Aaron’s effort to break Babe Ruth’s home run record, gave fans little reason to cheer in the franchise’s early days in the market. But as TBS — and the Braves — reached more and more Americans, the team’s on-field performance started to turn around.
Boosted by future Hall of Fame pitchers Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz and hitters Chipper Jones and Andruw Jones, the Braves became the National League’s premier team during the 1990s, reaching the World Series in 1991, 1992, 1996 and 1999 and winning it in 1995. And fans throughout the South and across the country could catch them every night thanks to the unique relationship between the team and Turner’s network.
It was that dynamic that both the Braves and MLB highlighted in statements marking Turner’s passing.
“Ted Turner was a visionary whose impact on the media landscape transformed how fans experience sports,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said, adding, “Through his leadership, the Atlanta Braves reached millions of households nationwide on TBS, helping build a legacy of sustained excellence that included the franchise’s first championship in Atlanta with the 1995 Braves.”
The Braves, in a separate statement, praised Turner’s “visionary leadership and innovative approach to broadcast television” that “transformed the Braves into ‘America’s Team.'”
The team also described Turner as “one of a kind — a brilliant businessman, consummate showman and passionate fan of his beloved Braves.”
Never was that showmanship more apparent than when Turner made a choice he may be more remembered for in some corners than for his positioning of the Braves as a national entertainment juggernaut — when he literally took over his team for a day in 1977.
Turner’s decision, however fun in a “What would you do if you owned a baseball team for a day?” sense, was met with immediate pushback from Major League Baseball, which allowed him to manage the Braves for only a single game — a 2-1 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates — before it prohibited him from managing moving forward.
“Here’s something people don’t know: Ted wore my shoes that day,” Cito Gaston, a Braves left fielder who scored a run in the game, told NBC News. “He didn’t have a pair of cleats or whatever to wear, so he wore my shoes, but I never got them back, either, so he kept them. But Ted was a great man.”
Hall of Fame pitcher Goose Gossage, who earned the save for Pittsburgh in the game Turner managed, said, “He was truly an out-and-out character.”
At the time, Turner’s decision was met with derision around the majors.
“I’m not surprised to hear it,” former Brave-turned-Texas Ranger Ken Henderson told The Atlanta Constitution’s Alan Greenberg and Kelly Dude at the time. “It’s the Ed Sullivan Show over there, a big circus.”
Turner cheers for the Braves in his only game as manager.R.C. Greenawalt / AP file
Said Bob Lurie, then the owner of the San Francisco Giants: “I think it’s the most unusual decision I ever heard of. It doesn’t make much sense. I don’t think it’s right, but that’s his business.”
Buzzie Bavasi, then the general manager of the San Diego Padres, was seemingly in shock.
“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it,” Bavasi said. “If this has really occurred, it’s got to be one of the most ridiculous things I’ve seen in baseball.”
Turner hopped into the dugout after the Braves dropped 16 games in a row. His reasoning at the time was to find out for himself why the team was struggling.
“I have found out all I can from the stands,” Turner said of the decision, according to a story in The Atlanta Journal the day after he managed. “Now I want to learn first hand what is going on, what is wrong. It can’t hurt us. Not now. Not the way we’re going.”
Turner gave manager Dave Bristol a 10-day sabbatical, signed a managerial contract of his own and led the team during a Wednesday night game against the Pirates. Gaston had broken into the big leagues in 1967 with Atlanta, and he returned to the team in 1975, the year before Turner purchased the team. He quickly found the new owner to be one who treated players well. Gaston said Turner arranged jobs and helped pay for home down payments for any Braves players who lived in Atlanta during the offseason.
Turner was also a competitive “go-getter,” he said. Gaston recalled once watching Turner challenge longtime pitcher Tug McGraw to a contest to see who could roll a baseball to home plate, using only their noses, the fastest. One started at third base, the other at first base, before they crawled down the baseline toward home.
Turner won.
“His face was bloody because he wasn’t rubbing it with his nose; he rolled with everything he could to beat Tug there,” Gaston said.
Still, even an understanding of Turner’s eccentricities didn’t prepare the Braves to learn the morning of their game against Pittsburgh that the team’s owner was now the manager.
“We found out about it once we got to the ballpark, and we were a little bit in shock, because we never heard of that before, never seen that before,” Gaston said. “You know, Ted was great to us, so we didn’t have no problem with that.”
Turner leaned on assistant coaches for guidance during the game. If a hard-hit ball by Darrel Chaney hadn’t hopped the fence for a ground-rule double that prevented a Braves runner from scoring, Atlanta might have won.
The morning after the game, National League President Chub Feeney told Turner not to manage any more games until the contract was reviewed. Turner was “disappointed,” Gaston recalled.
Feeney and MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ultimately told Turner that anybody who owned stock in a team wasn’t allowed to manage it, which irked the mogul.
“If I’m smart enough to buy the team, I ought to be smart enough to manage it,” Turner told reporters afterward. “This is like a game to me. This is just a big Little League team.”
As Turner’s day in the dugout proved, he cut a different profile from most owners. Contract negotiations between players and teams could be brutal, but Gossage, who played for 22 years, recalled one free-agency negotiation with Turner as “pretty pleasant.” MLB is missing such colorful personalities, Gossage said.
“The way he talked and the way he just went about his business was really fun interacting with him,” he said.
Despite MLB’s protest against owners’ acting as managers, Turner wasn’t done finding his way onto the field. Just one year after his brief managerial stint, he served as the third-base umpire as a stunt during a 1978 exhibition between the Braves and their minor-league affiliate the Richmond Braves. According to an account from the time, he spent the game “standing behind third base with a giant chaw of tobacco ballooning in his cheek.”
Twelve years after Turner’s memorable night as a manager, Gaston became a manager himself in 1989 with Toronto. By 1992, he led the Blue Jays to the first of two straight World Series titles — by beating Atlanta.
“When we beat him in the World Series, he wrote me — I have it on my wall here,” Gaston said. “He wrote me a nice letter and congratulated me, even though we beat his club. He’s an amazing guy.”