and i could very easily see us behind the pads by weeks end... 10 Degrees: Dodgers and their crazy TV deal top MLB's biggest disappointments By Jeff Passan | Yahoo Sports! -- 18 hours ago A metaphysical question, with a slight twist: If a baseball game is played and no one can see it on TV, does the baseball game really count? The standings say yes. The statistics agree. And yet to the greater Los Angeles area, 70 percent of whom cannot watch the Dodgers in the comfort of their homes, they might as well not exist. The most expensive team money can buy is also the most expensive mistake in the short history of wildly overpriced, patently absurd local-television-rights deals. For an estimated $8.3 billion, Time Warner Cable bought the rights to the Dodgers and created SportsNet LA. Time Warner then suggested to cable and satellite providers that they pay at least $4 a month to carry the channel, a fee they would pass along to subscribers. Every one of them kindly told Time Warner to suck a lemon, and so here we are, with the most popular baseball team in the game's second-biggest media market practically blacking itself out on account of its own efforts to fatten its pockets. And let's not twist this any other way: This is a Dodgers issue and a Time Warner issue, and any effort to spin it otherwise is revisionism. When you have a product like the TV rights to a baseball team, and the value of those TV rights is an ever-moving and nebulous dollar amount, it is incumbent on the parties paying those dollars and receiving those dollars to ensure they will recoup those dollars one way or another. Everybody in the television business agrees: DirecTV, the satellite giant, sets the standard with sports programming – and should continue to do so even after its purchase by AT&T over the weekend. When it agrees to a carriage deal, the rest of the providers fall in line and do the same. For Time Warner to promise the Dodgers an average of more than $330 million a season for the next 25 years without even a soft carriage agreement in place with DirecTV is malpractice, a monster bet on an audience it clearly did not understand.Were cancellation orders flowing in on account of the Dodgers' invisibility, surely DirecTV would reconsider its tack, much as it did when the Lakers launched their own network and fans cried foul at its absence on satellite. More than a quarter of the 2014 baseball season has passed, and DirecTV is firm as ever in its stand, which is frightening for the Dodgers, because it reinforces a troublesome truth: By chasing every last dollar and choosing Time Warner, a direct competitor to DirecTV and other providers, they failed to protect their greatest asset. Not a TV contract but a team. Naturally, the buck-passing is starting, cracks in the unified Dodgers-Time Warner front apparent. Peter Guber, one of the Dodgers' co-owners, recently told the Los Angeles Times: "We sold the rights to a gigantic corporation, it's their job to market the rights and get the distribution. We are not happy that they haven't been able to get the full distribution in our own market that they promised. That's their job. They made the bet." Actually, this bet was two-fold. The Dodgers bet on Time Warner to fulfill its duties, fully aware that an inability to do so would render them mute in a Los Angeles sports scene that thrives on noise. Of course, maybe that's a good thing, consider just how disappointing the … 1. Los Angeles Dodgers have been over the season's first seven weeks. Even though they're an above-.500 team, they're barely that at 23-22, and the scrutiny of last season's start isn't quite the same considering nobody has seen how mediocre they look. It's more of a collective problem than an individual one. Their lineup is serviceable, even with Hanley Ramirez playing like the late-Marlins model and Dee Gordon cooling down and A.J. Ellis just back. Their pitching staff is loaded with brand names, some of whom are thriving (Zack Greinke, Josh Beckett, Dan Haren) and others of whom are merely surviving (Chris Perez, Paul Maholm, Brian Wilson). Their disappointment is more relative than anything. On one hand, the Dodgers are in third place, behind the Giants (who have won two of the past four World Series) and the Rockies (who have finished in the National League West cellar two of the past three seasons). And on the other, at this point last season, the Dodgers were 19-26, on their way to a 30-42 start, from which they recovered by the grace of an incredible 53-13 stretch, the sort that made them favorites in a postseason...[...] click HERE for numbers 2 through 910. Los Angeles Dodgers possess: an endless cauldron of money into which they can dip, filling every obvious problem with a flash of the wallet. It's really quite impressive, and it's what the Dodgers figured their next quarter century would resemble.Sure would be nice if the fans didn't have to drive to Dodger Stadium to see it. Even at 23-22, the Dodgers are a hot ticket. The infusion of excitement from getting to watch them on TV every day – to see the narrative of a season build instead of trying to piece one together from now-and-again trips to the stadium – matters to the modern consumer. There's a reason local-TV deals have fetched billions. Because in those cases, demand dictated the price of the sale.The tail wagged the dog with the Dodgers, and maybe the AT&T-DirecTV merger will force the issue instead of seeing the Dodgers go on the public-relations offensive while DirecTV continues to make the same reasonable point: Why charge everyone $4 for a channel not all of them watch?It's a salient point, one that strikes right at the heart of the TV-rights system that continues to move toward a-la-carte programming. If you want SportsNet LA, you should have it. If not, you shouldn't. Simple enough. And yet because past TV deals have forced consumers into buying products they don't want, the Dodgers want to argue precedent holds.So it shall, from now until whenever the lawyers say the Los Angeles Invisibles can return to television and remind people what they were missing in the first place.
Whatever it is, it rings so true, and that is the crying shame of it all. I notice that CK wasn't mentioned in the pitchers, probably because no one can categorize him right now...who knows? I sure hope he doesn't go the way of Tim Lincecum, but something is different, you can't deny. I wouldn't agree that Haren and Beckett are "thriving"...IMO, that's a bit of a stretch.Outside of Greinke, and a recent upswing by League, there is no one on the staff that is nails right now. Very disheartening overall.
