Harold Brazil, a former member of the DC city council, is angry, with good reason, that the rights to televise Washington Nationals games belong to Peter Angelos, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, and a direct competitor for the baseball fans' dollars in the DC area.
Angelos has the power to decide how many Nats games to televise and to whom, and he is exercising this power by preventing Nats fans in Howard County and other areas between Washington and Baltimore from seeing Nationals games on TV.
But that is only part of the tangled web. Angelos created a regional sports network called the Mid Atlantic Sports Network to compete with the likes of ESPN and Comcast Sports Net. The problem is that he already has a deal with Comcast to broadcast the Orioles' games.
Comcast is the largest cable operator in the region, and it is critical that it carry the Nats' games. Comcast says that the Mid Atlantic Sports Network exists only because Angelos is in breach of his contract with Comcast and that it will not air his network. Angelos disagrees and says that the contract allows him to start his own sports network.
This dispute is now in the courts, leaving the rest of us stranded on base in the bottom of the ninth inning.
I disagree with his latter assessment. It's more like being down 21-0 in the top of the second with two down and none on.
Anyways, Angelos has the rights to the Nats broadcasts as part of a compensation deal reached between him and Major League Baseball for moving the Montreal Expos to DC during the offseason. Since the Orioles drew from the DC area, Angelos had a case for compensation. But the Major League front office gave him way too much.
Here's a riddle.
What do you call the Washington Nationals with highly limited media revenue?
Answer: the Montreal Expos.
HT to the Emirates Economist