HOW DOES MLB TAKE OVER A LOCAL BROADCAST? EVEN WITH MONTHS OF PLANNING, IT'S A MAD SCRAMBLE

Doug Johnson was answering emails at the Miami East hotel on May 30 when his phone rang with the call he had been awaiting for more than two months: Major League Baseball was taking over San Diego Padres’ television broadcasts the next day from financially troubled Diamond Sports.

“Immediately headed over to the stadium and got a chance to meet for the first time with the game announcers,” said Johnson, hired in March as MLB’s senior vice president and executive producer of local media. “I had to call every single person that worked the Padres’ home games and basically introduce myself and hire them.”

Johnson’s job was to ensure a seamless transition of Padres’ telecasts from Miami on May 31 and June 1 while getting ready for the start of a homestand on June 2. He and his staff are following that playbook again this week after MLB took over Arizona Diamondbacks’ telecasts from Bally Sports Arizona starting with Tuesday’s game at Atlanta.

MLB’s takeover ended blackout restrictions tied to San Diego’s deal with Diamond, and the league says Padres games are now accessible to 3.26 million homes, up from 1.13 million under Diamond’s Bally Sports San Diego. Through the All-Star break, MLB says viewership is up 14% over the comparable period last year.

Arrangements to make that change could have filled an entire offseason. MLB had to compress that to 1 1/2 days.

“It was everything from a graphics package, to the truck, to the crew, to how are you going to get transmission done, who’s going to do master control, who’s going to do commercial insertion and then finally how do we deliver it to the distributors?” said Billy Chambers, who started in February as MLB’s executive vice president of local media following 20 years at Fox.