WABI learns hard way how to treat big event

With apologies to Abraham Lincoln: You can satisfy some of the people some of the time, but you can’t satisfy all the people all the time.

People at Bangor television station WABI (Channel 5) discovered the inherent truth of that phrase and Murphy’s Law last weekend.

WABI was scheduled to show both the Boston Red Sox game at 1 p.m. and The Masters golf tournament at 4 p.m. on Sunday.

It was already kind of a scheduling close shave, given major league baseball games last an average of 2 1/2 to three hours.

But WABI officials weren’t too worried. After all, the only things that could screw things up were a rain delay or extra innings.

Unfortunately for viewers of both events and WABI, the game was delayed an hour by rain and went into extra innings.

WABI’s solution to this dilemma when the two sports collided at 4 p.m. was to show both using what amounted to a picture-in-picture approach. The Red Sox game was shown on a small segment of the screen in the upper left-hand corner while the golf tournament was shown on a screen about twice as large in the lower right. The audio was from the golf tournament.

Steve Hiltz got the idea from watching a feed from WGME (Channel 13) in Portland, a fellow CBS affiliate.

But about an hour later, the WABI program director decided to make a switch. The Red Sox game got the audio feed and was on the larger screen while the Masters was relegated to the silent small screen.

“In retrospect, that was not the right decision to make,” said Hiltz, noting that WGME never deviated from giving the Masters the larger screen and the audio feed, and he shouldn’t have either.

“I was taking a lot of calls and was under a lot of pressure at the time. It was a nightmare because everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

In fact, this was a Murphy’s Law case study. Not only did the game start late and go into extra innings, but the Red Sox came back from a huge deficit early and took a lead before Cleveland tied it up. At the same time, Greg Norman was in the midst of giving up a six-stroke lead in the final round.

And it didn’t stop there. With Hiltz holding out hope he could switch the full picture and sound to the golf tournament for at least the final couple of holes, the Sox game went on and on until Cleveland won in 11 innings.

“I said as soon as we can get out of the Sox, we’re gone to the golf match,” said Hiltz.

But to put the final nail in the coffin, Boston’s Mike Greenwell made the game’s last out at 6:49 p.m. – the exact time Nick Faldo watched his final putt fall in the cup for a come-from-behind win.

“It couldn’t have been any worse. The worst-case scenario happened at every step of the way,” Hiltz said. “At least this is going to help us develop a solid policy for this type of situation in the future.”

Hiltz said he was reluctant to leave the Red Sox game because of a station policy against leaving games in progress.

“My first move was the right one, but I didn’t stick with it. I apologize to the fans of both events,” said Hiltz, adding that he started fielding calls as soon as he arrived at the station around 1 p.m.

“I came in because I knew we were going to have a problem when the Sox game didn’t start on time. We started getting flooded with calls at 4 p.m.,” he said.

WABI showed ads from the Sox game and the Masters feed on the full screen intermittently, fueling conjecture that the station was trying to get their local sponsors’ ads the full-screen treatment.

“We didn’t have any local spots during the Masters. We did take commercials full screen so they would count as used spots during the Red Sox telecast,” Hiltz said. “But I found out we could have made those spots up.”

So what did Hiltz learn from this nightmarish experience?

“If it were my choice, we would never schedule a Red Sox game on the same day as the Masters. That’s what I think we should do,” he said.