ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Bob Hope recalls the moment when Ted Turner asked him what would happen if Turner broadcast all of the Atlanta Braves games on his small, struggling UHF station, WTCG Channel 17 in Atlanta.
“I said, ‘Well, Ted, if our teams are good, everyone will know it,” Hope, who had become the Braves’ director of public relations and promotions at the age of 24, said. “And I said, ‘If our teams are bad, everyone will know about that, too.’”
Mission accomplished.
More than 50 years after that conversation which propelled, at that time, the only Major League Baseball franchise south of the Mason-Dixon Line into the national sports consciousness, the Atlanta Braves are returning this season to the station which branded them “America’s Team.”
After taking over his father’s outdoor advertising business in 1963, Robert Edward Turner III entered the world of broadcasting, buying WJRJ Channel 17 in Atlanta in 1969. He promptly changed the station’s call letters to WTCG (for Turner Communications Group, though local lore alleged WTCG actually stood for “Watch This Channel Grow.”)
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In 1972, Turner shocked the baseball and broadcasting worlds when he acquired the rights to broadcast Braves games on WTCG; the Braves could be seen on Channel 17 beginning in 1973. Turner bought the team in 1976, promoting Hope to vice president in charge of marketing.
“Back then, it was outrageous that Channel 17 would televise all of the Braves games,” Hope, now the longtime co-chairman and founder of Hope-Beckham, an Atlanta independent public relations and event marketing agency, said. “The prevailing wisdom in baseball was that if you televise more than 20 games a season, the market would become saturated.
“Now, all of a sudden, Ted wants to broadcast 60 to 100 games a year. But we didn’t know any better.”
In 1976, Turner purchased the Braves and launched TBS Superstation, originating the “Superstation” concept. That same year, the Federal Communications Commission gave Turner permission to broadcast his baseball games via satellite to other American markets, thus leading to the Braves becoming the first true “America’s team.”
On Dec. 17 of that year, Turner uploaded WTCG’s signal to a satellite called Satcom 1. WTCG would became WTBS in 1978, and then Superstation TBS, and the Atlanta Braves would become the first professional sports franchise whose games were available for viewing on a nationwide basis.
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“The idea of going onto a satellite caught baseball and everyone else by surprise,” Hope said. “Back then, you had regions in which you could promote and you couldn’t go outside that region. There were only a certain number of cities that had Major League baseball, meaning the rest of the country was wide open and you would watch whatever you could get.”
The nation got the Atlanta Braves.
In 1995, under Turner’s ownership, the Atlanta Braves won their first World Series championship since the team moved to the city in 1966. After the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta’s Olympic Stadium was retrofitted into Turner Field, which the team called home until moving to Cobb County in 2016.
On Oct. 1, 2007, TBS was relaunched as WPCH-TV and reformatted as an independent station. Now owned by Gray Television, owner of WANF-TV and Atlanta News First, and WPCH Peachtree TV, the station is broadcasting 10 Atlanta Braves spring training games and 15 regular season games in 2025.
“Going back to the future is important, because baseball is built around history,” Hope said. “This whole evolution is part of the Braves; it’s important that the games are available.”
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