Courtesy the Toronto Star

(March 22, 2011) After last weekend’s breaking MLSE sale news, I was even more buzzed about my Monday morning meeting with Scott Moore, the president of Rogers Broadcasting. I totally expected Moore to ignore his long list of calls from veteran reporters and divulge his company’s plans to me. A journalist can dream, right?

Unfortunately, no such luck.

Rogers is considered by media and analysts to be the prospective buyer to beat when it comes to the Leafs’ parent company. (It should be noted that I appear on the video game series Reviews on The Run, which airs on the Rogers-owned G4 and Citytv channels).

But much hinges on the fact that the MLSE charter says the broadcast rights of the teams it owns have to be auctioned off, which could serve as a poison pill to media companies looking to buy to lock up the sports content. The accountants are going through the details now, but beyond the billions of dollars at stake, newspaper bragging rights are in the mix as well.

Comparing recent newspaper coverage, the biggest difference is that the Star says Rogers is interested in MLSE, while the Globe & Mail says they are not.

Moore called all of the reports “speculation” and wouldn’t comment about MLSE, but did talk about the heightened importance of sports properties in the current competitive environment, specifically in regards to Rogers Sportsnet.

“The beauty for us in terms of baseball is, of course, we own the (Blue Jays). We show all 162 games,” he said. “We have all 162 games on radio. So if there’s one sport I think we should shine in, it’s baseball. I think you’ll see a lot of changes to our baseball coverage that really will show that it’s our jewel.”

Last week, they hired the recently retired Gregg Zaun, who was excellent during his stints doing playoff commentary, as an on-air analyst. Earlier this month, the company also added Shi Davidi from The Canadian Press to beef up the baseball writing and analysis on sportsnet.ca.

The company also moved quickly to add the rights to the Canadian team’s Davis Cup matches, in hopes of capitalizing on the ascendance of tennis phenom Milos Raonic. This past Wednesday, Rogers also applied to the CRTC for a French-language sports channel, presumably to take on CTV’s RDS, signaling that no front will be left uncovered in the sports media war.

In anticipation of TSN Radio’s debut in April, Sportsnet Radio Fan 590 has been tweaking its schedule, most recently announcing a noon-hour hockey show hosted by Darren Millard. But the company is still confident in the power of Bob McCown and Prime Time Sports. The Globe’s Stephen Brunt and the Star’s Damien Cox were hired to co-host the show, which is now being telecast for three hours a day on Sportsnet One, with the last hour also shown on the regional Sportsnet TV stations.

“Stephen and Damien were great gets for us. I was really thrilled with having them as part of our team,” said Moore. “Both of them felt strongly, particularly on the radio side, that they wanted to be associated with Bob McCown. They wanted to be associated with the No. 1 sports radio show in the country.”

Moore says the plan is to have all three appear more on Sportsnet and various other properties. Personally, I hate radio shows on TV, and I hope rumblings about plans to make the telecast a bit more TV-friendly are true — but really, if it isn’t broke there is no reason to fix it.

The big piece of news that everyone is waiting for is who exactly TSN Radio will line up against McCown.

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