Between 1989 and 2001, the MSG Network was the cable home of the New York Yankees. MSG paid an average of $55 million a year for those rights, and the deal is widely credited as having started a national trend towards greater team coverage on regional sports networks, with more games being broadcast than over-the-air stations' regular programming schedules could usually permit. MSG also produced the Yankees radio broadcasts from 1994 to 2001, which aired on WABC. MSG also owned the over the air broadcast rights to Yankee games, which they sold to long-time broadcaster WPIX from 1989 to 1998 and WNYW from 1999 to 2001 (at the time, News Corporation owned part of MSG). In 2002, the Yankees left MSG to form the YES Network. From 2002 to 2005, MSG aired games from Major League Baseball's New York Mets on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, games which previously aired on FSNY (MSG, FSNY, and WPIX each carried about 50 games a season on consistent days of the week). Like the Yankee deals, Cablevision also owned the broadcast TV rights, placing games on WWOR-TV before moving to WPIX in 1999. After the 2005 baseball season, Mets games moved to SportsNet New York, a cable network partially owned by the Mets, although WPIX retained a reduced slate of games. Comcast and Time Warner, which generally control whatever NYC-area cable systems Cablevision doesn't (Time Warner controls most of Upstate New York as well), are the other partners. From 2002 onward, games started airing on the newer YES Network.
