An appreciation of Ted Turner, a baseball maverick who used the Braves to conquer the world

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Turner had invited them there for a champagne toast, win or lose. He didn’t have to buy many bottles: the last-place Braves were no-hit by John Montefusco of the San Francisco Giants, with only 1,369 witnesses at the ballpark. “Being there in the early days of Ted Turner’s ownership of the Braves, the best way to put it is: never a dull moment,” Dale Murphy said on Wednesday. “Not in any way, shape, or form.” As Murphy remembers it, Turner called a clubhouse meeting at the end of that season, maybe that day. Through a reel-to-reel movie projector, Turner showed footage of himself at sea, yacht racing at high speeds. “He was amazing — like, elite,” said Murphy, a seven-time All-Star outfielder. “And the reason was his tenacity. It’s a team sport, he’s the leader making all these decisions, and what he was conveying to us was: ‘We’ve got to turn things around here. This is the kind of tenacity and focus I would expect of you as members of the Atlanta Braves. This is how I did it. This is how I want you to do it.’” Turner, who died on Wednesday at 87 years old, went on to win the America’s Cup the next summer. Baseball success would take longer, and in time, the Braves would become the model organization in the game. Yet, Turner’s legacy in the sport goes far beyond his hard-earned World Series ring. — Atlanta Braves (@Braves) May 6, 2026 He won that in 1995 after learning the lesson that has humbled so many other swaggering tycoons: the best way to win is to sit back and let wise baseball people do their jobs. The Braves were just part of Turner’s vast portfolio by then, and Turner would not have had it without the team. Baseball fed him as a competitor, to be sure, but he always understood how far it could take him. Turner, perhaps, was the first to fully recognize the extraordinary value in baseball’s great separator: volume. Every team plays 162 games a year, and Turner’s genius was in reimagining what that meant. He thought of them not as games, but as programming. He once told Bill Giles, his counterpart with the Philadelphia Phillies, that without the Braves on his TBS Superstation, he never could have founded CNN. It was no surprise to Giles, who had asked Turner in their first meeting, in 1976, what he wanted out of life. “He said, ‘I’m going to conquer the world with television,’” Giles recalled by phone on Wednesday. “He saw the whole world of television coming about the way it did come about.” Turner had started in outdoor advertising and bought a struggling Atlanta UHF station, Channel 17, in 1970. He changed the call letters to WTCG, for Watch This Channel Grow. To live up to that pledge, Turner wanted sports. Teams were reluctant then to televise many games, believing it would hurt ticket sales. The Braves’ affiliate, WSB, showed only 20 games per season, for $200,000 annually. In 1972, Turner offered to triple that figure if he could show 60 games. The cash-poor Braves agreed. The station’s profits soared; WTCG lost $900,000 in 1970 but made $1 million in 1973. When momentum fell sharply in 1975, Turner met with the Braves’ owner, Daniel Donahue, about how to revive the product. Donahue told him the team was for sale, and that Turner should buy it. He wanted $10 million. “The Braves were a key asset and I had to go for it,” Turner wrote in his memoir, “Call Me Ted,” in 2008. “Major League Baseball was high-quality programming for Channel 17, and by owning the team, I would control their long-term TV rights. Plus, owning the franchise would really put our company on the map.” Turner agreed to pay $1 million up front and the rest, with interest, over the next nine years. Fellow owners were skeptical that Turner might make good on his plan, then just a fantasy, of taking Channel 17 national and thus broadcasting his games in their cities. Turner won them over by vowing to abide by the best interests of baseball. Then, of course, he went his own way. “Had Ted been dishonest with us?” Commissioner Bowie Kuhn would write in his book, “Hardball,” in 1987. “He surely had, and he would later boast (about it) to me in my office.” Turner would sign pitcher Andy Messersmith — who had just been granted free agency in a landmark arbitration case that overruled the reserve clause — to a three-year, $1 million contract. He gave Messersmith the number 17, and replaced his name with “Channel” on the back of his jersey. If there was a way to do something different, Turner would find it. He took a young executive from his TV station, Terry McGuirk — now the Braves’ chairman — and put him in uniform for spring training. For three weeks, McGuirk was a ground-level conduit to the team’s new boss, debriefing Turner nightly to speed up his learning curve. Turner played poker with players. He tried to tie incentive clauses to team victories (the league nixed that idea). He led the fans in singing “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” and took part in loony promotions that would never occur to the stately, stuffy owners of yore. “He was riding the ostriches, he was pushing a ball down the third base line with his nose,” Los Angeles Dodgers president Stan Kasten, who worked for Turner for decades, said on Wednesday. “He was doing all of that because he was engaged and passionate about everything he ever undertook.” Kasten first met Turner that summer, by chance, when he was visiting St. Louis and spotted someone running up and down the aisles at a Braves/Cardinals game. For some reason, Kasten guessed, that might be Atlanta’s maverick new owner. Fresh out of law school, Kasten introduced himself and Turner gave him his card. Three years later, Kasten, at 27, was the youngest general manager in NBA history when Turner hired him to run his basketball team, the Atlanta Hawks. There was a magnetism to Turner, a manic everyman with boundless energy and an open mind. He helped players find off-season jobs and encouraged them to buy stock in his media company. “I think the key, though, to Ted winning our confidence was when he took up chewing tobacco,” the Braves’ star pitcher, Phil Niekro, wrote in his book, “Knuckleballs,” in 1986. “By then he’d already made numerous appearances in the clubhouse wearing his Levis and boat shoes, but it was tobacco that finally did it for Ted. From then on, we realized that we were more to him than just a tax write-off.” Players often feel warmly towards a generous owner, and Turner initially spent big. Kuhn briefly suspended him for tampering with Gary Matthews, a San Francisco Giants outfielder who signed a five-year, $1.75 million contract after the 1976 season. Matthews played well, but the Braves finished last in 1977 for the second year in a row. Mired in a 16-game losing streak early that season, Turner named himself manager in Pittsburgh on May 11. Even with Niekro, his Hall of Fame starter, on the mound, the Braves lost again. When Chub Feeney, the National League president, told Turner he was breaking an MLB rule against owners managing their teams, Turner took his call in front of the team’s beat reporters. “How about asking the commissioner for approval,” Turner pleaded, according to The Atlanta Constitution. “The worst thing that can happen is we’ll lose games, and we’ve done that plenty of times already. I believe in free enterprise. You gotta have freedom, and I don’t have much.” Alas, Kuhn backed Feeney and ordered Turner off the field, freezing his career managerial record at 0-1. The previous manager, Dave Bristol, got his job back, but Bobby Cox took over for more last-place finishes in 1978 and 1979. Turner kept trying to spend his way up in the standings. After the 1980 season, his five-year, $3.5 million deal for Claudell Washington — an outfielder with ordinary statistics — so dismayed the Phillies’ owner, Ruly Carpenter, that he sold his team over fears that salaries were hopelessly out of control. Washington did help the Braves win a division title in 1982, but four years later the team was back in the cellar. Turner enlisted Kasten as president. “We had a last-place team with the highest payroll in baseball,” Kasten said. “Think about that: You almost can’t do that if you’re trying to do it on purpose. And I said, ‘Look, Ted, here’s what has gone wrong for us. I know the ad boys who are selling our game on TV — which is the engine driving our train — need something to sell in the off-season, so you’re signing free agents every year: it’s Messersmith, it’s (Al) Hrabosky, it’s Claudell Washington. “‘This is taking us farther away from winning because of all the things that can go wrong when you spend that money on free agents, particularly if they don’t work out. You’re also blocking the development of younger players and you’re giving up draft-pick compensation. All those things are negatives, and if we invest in a long-term plan of player development, we’ll produce a lot more return on investment for us.’ “And halfway through he stops me and says, ‘Stan, I don’t need a lecture. Just do it.’” With Cox as general manager and Paul Snyder as scouting director — and Turner largely consumed by the rest of his business and philanthropic empire — the Braves built a rich pipeline of homegrown talent. Cox returned to the dugout in 1990 and John Schuerholz replaced him as general manager, giving the Braves Hall of Fame leadership and sparking a run of 14 consecutive division titles. Skip Caray, Ernie Johnson Sr. and Pete Van Wieren narrated it for millions on TBS. Murphy, a two-time Most Valuable Player in the 1980s, was traded before those glory years. But in a way, he said, Turner’s most important contribution came before all the winning. By beaming all that programming across the country, the Braves became “America’s Team,” as Turner called them — and the impact still reverberates. “What he did was create a whole generation of not only loyal Braves fans, but baseball fans,” Murphy said. “And so what has happened with the young kids that grew up with it, now they’re buying season tickets. They’re buying the MLB package. Because baseball is passed down from generation to generation, you’re creating this ongoing thing. “We weren’t that good all the time, but it didn’t matter. We were on. And we had great broadcasters — Ernie, Skip and Pete, who should be in the Hall of Fame — bringing a hometown broadcast to North Dakota. People fell in love with them and the Braves because Ted recognized that, or at least said, ‘I’m gonna try it.’ “And it’ll keep going. He grew the game like no one had before, and no one will ever be able to recreate that.” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms