Two months before the famous voice of Yankees PA announcer Bob Sheppard welcomed viewers to the start of the YES Network on March 19, 2002, Michael Kay was in a studio trying to keep the audience for the first taping of “CenterStage” entertained while waiting for Steve Young.
The former 49ers quarterback was coming down from ESPN’s studios in Bristol, Conn., but was delayed over 3 1/2 hours because of a brutal snowstorm.
“We brought in huge TV monitors and we watched the NFL playoff games and kept bringing in orders of pizza just so these people wouldn’t leave. That was my first experience on YES,” Kay said.
“It was a little bit of a rocky beginning, but Steve ended up being great, gracious, funny with the audience. Ten-plus years later we can laugh about it, but we weren’t laughing then. We were all pretty nervous that our first guest wasn’t going to show up.”
YES is now celebrating its 10th anniversary and can boast about being the nation’s most-watched regional sports network and having the most subscribers at more than 14 million. But Kay and the rest of the YES staffers had good reason to be nervous in the hectic six months that led up to the first broadcast.
George Steinbrenner had the same attitude with the network he had with his team: Anything but the best is unacceptable.
“There are times I thought the “Seinfeld” portrayal [of Steinbrenner] was accurate, but again there was a message there. He just wanted to get his message across, what his expectations are,” said John Filippelli, the president of production and programming for YES.
“I don’t think you get to be the brand that is the Yankees, and the brand that is YES, without someone driving you. And Mr. Steinbrenner was that force.”
As Steinbrenner did, the network had its detractors. Some have questioned whether the network is biased toward the Yankees, if having rotating analysts is the best way to cover a baseball game. And, in the beginning, there were those who were shut out from their favorite team. This may be the network’s 10th anniversary, but it’s only the ninth for Cablevision subscribers who were without YES for the first year due to a carriage dispute.
But Filippelli said his toughest challenge was getting the network on the air in March, after being hired on Sept. 10, 2001 — the day before the attacks on the World Trade Center.
“We had no time to put the network together,” he said. “If you had to say what our biggest obstacle was it was the ticking clock. We had to get a network on the air in what was obviously not a great work environment and all that was necessary to get on the air.”
It’s not hard drawing fans for Yankees broadcasts because of the team’s success. But the other team YES covers, the Nets, has fallen on hard times recently. Their broadcasts have included two of the top play-by-play men in the sport with Ian Eagle and Marv Albert.
“As a broadcaster you have to be better, more informative, more entertaining to keep people engaged to the broadcast,” said Eagle, who by season’s end will have called 515 Nets games. “When a team is coasting along, like it had been during the Jason Kidd years, broadcasts do themselves in many ways. The lean years [are] when you find out who can really do this and do it well.”