A (TV) league of its own.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS biz

Remember the George Carlin routine about the differences between baseball and football?

"Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness," Carlin would say. And then he'd pause, and purr quietly into the microphone that baseball has "the sacrifice."

It's a classic bit that goes on and on. But while the nation's pastime may be the more pastoral and gentler of the two sports, in the field of sports business, Major League Baseball is about to clobber the rough-and-tumble NFL over the head with a Louisville Slugger.

It all has to do with the modern-day sports trend of designing entire television networks around particular professional leagues. The NFL has The NFL Network, the NBA has NBA TV and the hockey guys have NHL Network. Next January, baseball finally catches up, with the MLB Network. It's late to the game, but baseball is about to show the other guys how it's done.

When it hits the "on" switch next winter, MLB Network will be available immediately to around 50 million cable and satellite TV subscribers, making it not just the biggest network launch in sports-TV history, but as the industry newspaper SportsBusiness Journal recently put it, "the most successful launch in cable TV history."

Go figure. Who knew the likes of MLB commissioner Bud Selig, a reed-thin car dealer from Wisconsin, would be fit to yell "scoreboard" in the face of a big, bad NFL, which badly overestimated subscriber goals for its television network?

Some background: In today's television environment, the hub around which the rest of the economics twirl is distribution. To succeed, networks need to convince cable and satellite TV companies like Colorado's Comcast and DISH Network to give up a place on the dial (or the remote control). Otherwise, nobody can watch.

That's where baseball came up with a strategy that it executed every bit as adroitly as a perfectly rendered squeeze play. Here's how it went: Before launching MLB Network, baseball owners invented something called "Extra Innings." It's a package of out-of-market games you can watch for an extra fee. In other words, if you love the Washington Nationals but live in Salida, you can still catch most of their games on "Extra Innings."

There's nothing novel there: Football has offered a...