What's it mean? It means first we can stop talking about this thing which always drove a small wedge between me, who thought MLB were the bad guys, and Nats fans, who saw the Orioles as that. I won't relinquish my position.
When the Expos moved to DC what SHOULD HAVE happened was MLB should have told the Orioles to stuff it, "broadcast rights areas" are made up nonsense, we're putting a team here. The O's wouldn't necessarily had a legal leg to stand on because this is all true. Of course MLB is made up of owners and owners don't want to break that broadcast rights areas" agreement (or didn't at the time) because it was crucial to soaking cable channels for rights fees or cable providers for channel fees. So instead they gave the Orioles control of the Nats broadcast for a certain time and dollar amount.
What SHOULD HAVE happened next is "too bad, so sad" Nats, MLB got you a bad deal but a deal is a deal. Instead after a few years and when the Nats finally had ownership, MLB basically started working with the Nats to try to get out of the deal using questionable arbiters and rulings. The Orioles sued over it and we ended up in forever litigation bc the core components, if you push it, who can make these money decisions based off what, were very gray.
The funny thing is just letting things go in a more black and white way would have probably put the Orioles over a barrel anyway with far less legal leverage but no one had the patience for that.
Now it means the Nats have their broadcast rights and can be sold and perhaps it means that Ted Leonsis, who wants both the team and stuff to air on his channel, will get the team. Or someone else. Or no one else. Or the rights are secretly promised to MLB for whatever their plans are. Really we don't know.
However when it comes to the Nats, MLB and broadcast rights deals we can be sure there is some back alley deal that was made.Why break tradition?
4 comments:
Harper, putting aside what you think will happen: what should Nats fans root for: (1) Lerner family maintains control; (2) Lerner family sells to Leonsis; (3) other? I'm inclined to say that (2) or (3) is superior to (1).
I'm right there with you on the MLB caved when they shouldn't have. But they wanted to avoid litigation on the franchise move itself, as that would have opened up to discovery a lot of things that MLB preferred to keep quiet about the odd franchise ownership shuffle between the Expos, the Marlins, and the Red Sox. MLB knew that Angelos had no real legal leg to stand on. They also knew that this would not have prevented Angelos from launching seemingly endless litigation that could have held up the move indefinitely (as well as the keeping things out of discovery angle). So MLB punted. And it worked! MLB avoided endless litigation on the move itself. That it resulted in endless litigation between the teams down the road didn't bother MLB at all.
That said, the Lerners have no beef with the MASN agreement, because it was part of the deal when they sought to buy the team. If they weren't willing to live by it, they didn't have to buy the team. I'm certain that they factored MASN into their purchase price.
Where I differ is on your idea that MLB and the Nats worked to get out of the deal. Literally all of the MASN litigation* has been about the O's failing to live up to their part of the bargain, namely the O's belief that they should be allowed to set the TV rights fees as low as they wanted. Which was to their benefit since the broadcast rights fees to each team had to be the same where the money that remained with MASN went overwhelmingly to the O's (and also didn't count as money that went into MLB revenue sharing). The MASN agreement included a dispute resolution system that said that if the teams could not reach an agreement on the rights fees that would be handled by MLB's RSDC. Two things about the RSDC being a "shady arbiter." (1) The RSDC figure for the rights fees invariably came down much closer to the amount suggested by the O's than that suggested by the Nats. The Nats accepted those figures per the contract. The O's fought them. (2) If the O's had a beef with the RSDC, they could have fought for another dispute resolution mechanism or refused to sign the MASN deal. It can hardly be said that Peter Angelos was some wide-eyed naif who was hornswoggled by nefarious MLB negotiators. The man was one of the most wealthy litigators in the country. The time for him to object to the RSDC was in negotiating the deal.
The latter point is why the O's lost so consistently in courts. Courts are extremely reluctant to step into dispute resolution mechanisms in general, and in particular those agreed to between sophisticated peer parties. This is not a shady arbiter showing favoritism - it's a general legal principle. The whole idea of dispute resolution/arbitration clauses are to keep things OUT of courts.
And the legal issues, despite the slow pace of litigation, were always pretty cut and dried for those reasons. The O's one victory, in 2014, was a pyhrric one. While the original award was tossed out on conflict of interest grounds, it was a conflict of interest on the part of the law firm the Nats hired. The O's lost on every. single. substantive. argument. Which is why at the time I predicted, correctly, that despite "winning" it would be the O's who appealed the ruling.
*The Nats did once seek to have the MASN agreement terminated by claiming that the O's failing to live up to their contractual obligation to pay the rights fees amounted to a material breech of contract. Courts were no more impressed by this argument than they were by MASN/Angelos seeking to weasel their way around the dispute resolution clause.
@John C this is why I blame the O's. You can blame MLB for setting up a dumb deal, but you're right, they were afraid of Angelos abusing the legal system to gum up the sale.
Instead, they made a dumb deal, and then Angelos abused the legal system to gum up the process of being forced to hold up the O's end of the bargain. It's all been an abuse of the legal system, to the Nats' detriment.
I can appreciate the frustration with the Lerners. But....under Leonsis' leadership the Wizards have been a dumpster fire, chronically in rebuild mode. The Caps won a title and have been (and currently are) decent and well run. The Mystics? Up and down. It shouldn't be assumed that a Leonsis-owned Nats outperform a Lerners-owned Nats.
The wildcard is if one assumes (like I do) that the Nats commitment to payroll has been hampered by MASN uncertainty. Yes they paid top dollar to get/retain good players like Werth, Scherzer, Stras and Zimm. But a lot of their biggest contracts had major deferrals, perhaps because of cash flow concerns due to MASN uncertainty, that still dog the team's finances today.
I'm not a Lerner apologist by any means, but it would be good to see what happens now that they are unshackled somewhat by the financial certainty before we root for them being kicked (or self-kicked) to the curb. Especially for Uncle Ted.
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