News

With a schedule of 116 games, Rogers Sportsnet will continue to be the Toronto Blue Jays' principal network this coming season.

Sportsnet will air the Jays' opener against the Tigers in Detroit, an afternoon game on Monday, April 2, and also the home opener, in prime time, on April 9 against the Kansas City Royals.

TSN's schedule will consist of 20 games, but a small number are pencilled in for the CBC, which is expected to return as a Jays broadcaster after an absence of four years.

Two sources said the CBC will carry only eight games. Scott Moore, the head of CBC Sports, would not comment.

The CBC will need to fit the Jays into a summer of heavy sports programming that includes Canadian Football League games and, most likely, a schedule involving the Major League Soccer franchise Toronto FC.

The CBC, although starting small, will more than double its Jays schedule in 2008, when it will no longer own CFL rights.

About 17 Jays games, those played on weekday afternoons and in other undesirable time slots, will not be carried by a Canadian broadcaster.

This weekend, Sportsnet will air two Jays exhibition games, Yankees on Saturday (YES Network) and Cincinnati Reds on Sunday (Sportsnet).

Morning launch

Rogers Sportsnet has launched a 30-minute morning sportscast to replace its 60-minute replay of the late-night telecast.

The new show airs at 6 a.m. local times in the East, West and Ontario regions (the Pacific region is excluded) and is repeated until noon.

Condensing the news and highlights into a 30-minute package is a good idea. Daru Dhillon, who has been working on Sportsnet Connected as the host of The Inbox, is fine as the show's anchor, although she drops her 'g's — going becomes goin'. Sloppy diction may be cool at Connected, where everything is casual, but nowhere else.

Moving downtown

Rogers Sportsnet will move its headquarters out of the CTV compound in Agincourt to downtown Toronto later this year.

Sportsnet has been based at Agincourt, in northern Toronto, since its launch in 1998 as CTV Sportsnet. It was joined at Agincourt by TSN when its acquisition by CTV was approved in 2000. Sportsnet's ownership subsequently changed when Rogers became the principal stakeholder.

Some at Sportsnet have complained about feeling like "poor country cousins" to CTV and TSN at Agincourt.

Sportsnet's downtown location will be the "Rogers Campus," a cluster of buildings in the Mount Pleasant-Jarvis area.

Madness numbers

The Score averaged 40,000 viewers for its coverage of the first four days of the U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association men's basketball tournament. That's down 36 per cent from Sportsnet's 62,000 average for the entire 2006 tournament.

The Score averaged 32,000 on the first day, compared with Sportsnet's 79,000 a year ago. The Score's day was Saturday (52,000).

The numbers should rise, but with 16 teams remaining, The Score will have fewer alternatives to CBS's coverage. Other handicaps: audio problems and complaints from high-definition television consumers about the quality of The Score's "stretched" picture.

CBS earned a 5.8 overnight rating (percentage of U.S. households tuned in) for the first four days March Madness. That's an increase of 3.6 per cent from last year.

Movie tournament

The online service SportsBusiness Daily has organized its own Sweet 16 tournament — for movies. The entries are: Rocky, Jerry Maguire, Caddyshack, Miracle, Bull Durham, Chariots of Fire, Field of Dreams, North Dallas Forty, Slap Shot, Hoop Dreams, Hoosiers, The Longest Yard, Raging Bull, Bang the Drum Slowly, Seabiscuit and The Natural. Omissions include The Hustler, Breaking Away and Eight Men Out. They're superior to Rocky and Seabiscuit, although the subject matter of The Hustler (pool) and Breaking Away (cycling) is not mainstream.