Stealing home

Of course, in the long run, the payroll and the win-loss record are perhaps the least of Hicks' concerns. After all, he likes to explain that a sports franchise rarely loses its value over the long haul--just look at the Rangers, perennial losers worth a quarter of a billion dollars.

Rather, Hicks is blunt about the real reason he bought the Rangers: to flesh out his dream of the regional sports network he hopes to get off the ground by 2000. He has the money to do it, the broadcasting resources, and now he's got the teams.

On August 12, 1997, Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst bought LIN Television, the nation's 22nd-largest television group, from AT&T for $1.9 billion. Earlier this month, the LIN ownership approved the deal. Locally, LIN owns eight channels, including KXAS-Channel 5 and KXTX-Channel 39, the latter of which currently broadcasts Rangers games--and a hell of a lot more down the road, if Hicks' plan comes to fruition.

Hicks--who will rank as the country's second-largest radio station operator when his firm acquires SFX Broadcasting for $2.1 billion on May 31--envisions a regional sports network that would feature the Stars, the Rangers, and even the Mavericks surrounded by men's and women's college sports, coaches' shows, and sports-news programming. It will compete directly against Rupert Murdoch's Fox Sports Net, which the media mogul formed a few years ago as an alternative to ESPN.

Murdoch figured someone in Dallas was more likely to watch the Stars play the Colorado Avalanche than a Stanford-Arizona college football game. He could also sell substantially more local and regional advertising by narrowing down the viewing audience. Currently, Fox Sports Net owns the regional broadcast rights to 49 pro teams and reaches about 55 million homes nationwide, according to Forbes. That includes the Dallas Mavericks, Dallas Stars (locked into a deal with FSN until the end of next season), and Texas Rangers (who will share broadcasts with Channel 39 till 2000).

Hicks expects the network would most likely be broadcast over Channel 39 and another cable channel; Hicks, Muse already owns a piece of Marcus Cable as well. And he will likely have to bring in either FSN or ESPN to provide the wrap content. His current plan would essentially kill Fox Sports Southwest.

"We're in active negotiations with [Fox and ESPN] now," Hicks says. "You wanna have as many of the wrap sports as you can. I mean, the consumers want to listen to all the other sports those two people provide too. Our games don't fill up but a small portion of the time. They're the must-see local sports that bring the audience to the network, then you have all sorts of other programming alternatives they want to see as well."

There is a precedent for a network such as the one Hicks is proposing: In July 1997, Comcast-Spectacor announced the creation of Comcast SportsNet in the Philadelphia area, which would offer baseball (Phillies), hockey (Flyers), and basketball (76ers) games. Not coincidentally, Comcast also owns a majority stake in the 76ers, the Flyers, and two arenas in the Philadelphia area, the CoreStates Spectrum and the just-completed CoreStates Center.

When a similar setup occurred in Detroit with the Tigers and Red Wings, the value of the baseball and hockey teams skyrocketed after ESPN and Fox got in a bidding war to provide that wrap content.

Hicks bought the Rangers, a team worth $89 million nine years ago, for $250 million--thanks in large part to the new ballpark. Imagine the value of the franchise when it's the anchor of a regional sports network.

Hicks insists he doesn't want to create a superstation, like Ted Turner's WTBS, home of the Atlanta Braves, or WGN, which broadcasts Chicago Cubs and White Sox games across the country. He explains they are dinosaurs, relics of cable's early days, the pre-ESPN era when companies were desperate for content of any kind. More likely, Hicks doesn't even want to think about a superstation because of all the furor surrounding Rupert Murdoch. Not only are owners concerned about his bottomless pockets ruining the small-market teams' payrolls, they're also hesitant about giving ownership of a team to the man whose network owns the rights to broadcast major-league baseball till 2000. San Diego Padres owner John Moores is particularly outspoken against the Murdoch purchase.

But owners and acting MLB commissioner Bud Selig believe Hicks' purchase will be accepted by the league with little question. He will be good for the sport, willing to pump more money into a team that, just a decade ago, was a laughingstock--a losing major-league team wasting away in a minor-league park. If nothing else, the current ownership has turned a once-shabby organization into a respectable organization--one that signed Nolan Ryan, built a baseball cathedral in the middle of a strip-mall prairie, and proved its loyalty to fans and Ivan Rodriguez by giving him a five-year, $42-million deal last season.