When former Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner passed away this week, many fondly remembered him for his impact on the Braves, turning them into America's Team thanks to his decision to broadcast games nationwide on TBS and his heavy investment in the team (that might have gone a little overboard at times).
Younger Braves fans might be aware of the impact airing Braves games on TBS had on baseball, but few fans raised after the TBS era are aware of another change the media mogul made that still influences the game today.
Ted Turner's five minutes after the hour mark still lives on
Baseball fans today likely don't blink an eye when they see look at an MLB team's schedule and see that a game is set to start at 7:05, 7:15, or any time after the hour, but it wasn't always that case.
Prior to Turner and the start of WTBS, baseball games would usually start on the hour mark. However, when Ted Turner launched Turner Broadcasting System in the early 1980s, he wanted to start programming at five minutes after the hour and half-hour marks to account for channel flippers. The thought was, that if TBS programming started slightly after every other channel, people flipping through channels wouldn't miss any action by the time they landed on TBS.
This included Braves games starting at 7:05 instead of 7:00. Turner had started airing the Braves nationwide on WTCG a few years earlier, before WTBS became official. While Turner wasn't necessarily the first to set baseball games to odd start times, he certainly was a pioneer, with Jacob Pomrenke of the Society for American Baseball Research that the game time shifts became far more common after TBS.
When Turner passed away, fans were quick to make quips about his his programming start times, but these went over the head of a younger generation, who never lived in a world where baseball started right on the hour mark.
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