Baseball Bloggers Alliance

(NOTE: This is the ninth in a series of reviews of the candidacies of selected players listed on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, leading up to the early-January announcement and July enshrinement of the Class of 2010.)

A lot of the love Dale Murphy gets during Hall of Fame debates stems from an overlooked factor in baseball’s evolution — the superstation.

Today, we have games streaming onto our computer, we have the MLB network and cable giants ESPN, Fox, TBS and WGN showing us national games on a daily basis, and we take for granted the glut of televised baseball that’s available to us.

It wasn’t all that long ago, though, that the only games we saw on the tube were those showing on local broadcasts and the Saturday-afternoon network Game of the Week.

Then came cable television, which begat WTBS in Atlanta, which begat the superstation concept, which begat Atlanta Braves games being televised all over the country, which begat a nation of Braves fans, particularly in places — like here in West Virginia — where there’s really no local team to watch on a regular basis.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, when cable television was taking off,  WTBS became the first superstation, the first TV station to make its content available nationwide via the new cable/satellite technology. It wasn’t long before the network’s main attraction was Braves baseball, and the star of that particular program was the tall, friendly, likable, clean-living center fielder with All-American looks, a million-dollar smile and the talent to match it.

Murphy was the first superstation superstar, in the right place at the right time, when the explosion of cable television coincided with the peak of his career.

But was it a career worthy of the Hall of Fame?

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