{"id":549416,"date":"2026-01-28T15:07:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T15:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/549416\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T15:07:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T15:07:13","slug":"so-actually-the-dodgers-are-paying-an-increasing-share-of-their-tv-revenue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/549416\/","title":{"rendered":"So actually, the Dodgers ARE paying an increasing share of their TV revenue"},"content":{"rendered":"

After I posted this article<\/a> Tuesday citing a Joon Lee report on the Dodgers supposedly not paying their fair share of TV revenue sharing, my attention was called to this Los Angeles Times article by Bill Shaikin<\/a>, in which Lee\u2019s claims are, well, basically refuted:<\/p>\n

\n

It also revived a strange chapter in team history, with frenzied online commentary that the signing of Tucker was made possible in large part because Major League Baseball long ago rewarded the Dodgers\u2019 owners with preferential financial treatment that continues to this day.<\/p>\n

Is that true?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes and no.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This situation stems from the Dodgers\u2019 bankruptcy under former owner Frank McCourt and the settlement and TV deal that followed:<\/p>\n

\n

In a\u00a0settlement with McCourt<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and to avoid the risk of the judge imposing a deal less favorable to the league \u2014 MLB agreed the fair-market value of a Dodgers TV deal would be based on the very Fox deal that Selig had rejected.<\/p>\n

Why did that matter?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That value was $84 million for the first year and would increase thereafter, with the league taking its standard 34% cut and sharing that among all its teams.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But indeed, that value was not set at $84 million when all was said and done. Instead:<\/p>\n

\n

After negotiations, MLB and Guggenheim made\u00a0a modest adjustment<\/a>, setting the \u201cfair-market value\u201d of the Time Warner deal at about $130 million for the first year rather than $84 million. That figure is used to determine the league\u2019s cut, which for all local TV deals has since increased from 34% to 48%.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Thus, what the Dodgers pay to MLB from this TV revenue is also increasing as the years go by, based on the increas in that \u201cfair-market value\u201d amount. The Dodgers\u2019 very lucrative TV deal does go through 2039, and they are making a tremendous amount of money every year from it. That has more to do with the Dodgers\u2019 negotiating skill and some luck, as L.A.\u2018s 25-year RSN deal was signed just before the RSN bubble started to burst. I\u2019m sure you, the Cubs fan, are familiar with that because the Cubs created Marquee Sports Network just as the RSN bubble was bursting, and the Cubs aren\u2019t getting the \u201cwheelbarrows of cash\u201d that President of Business Operations Crane Kenney promised. This isn\u2019t Kenney\u2019s fault; it\u2019s just the way the TV marketplace has gone over the last several years.<\/p>\n

Advertisement<\/p>\n

It\u2019s my understanding that the $130 million baseline number quoted above has increased by a small amount each year, and thus so has the revenue sharing amount the Dodgers have paid. It\u2019s important to remember that revenue sharing of this type \u2014 from TV \u2014 is shared equally among all the MLB teams, so the Yankees (for example) get the same amount as (for example) the Brewers, unlike luxury tax payments, which are supposed to be used by lower-revenue teams for player payroll. The Dodgers paid $169 million into that pot for their 2025 payroll, which was more than the entire payrolls of 12 MLB teams for last year. Further, it doesn\u2019t seem as if the teams receiving this money are using it for player payroll. That\u2019s another issue entirely, one that hopefully will be dealt with in the next CBA.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more on this situation in this Forbes article by Maury Brown<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

MLB never gave the Dodgers a sweetheart deal. If Frank McCourt hadn\u2019t driven the Dodgers into a court-controlled sale, this messy loophole that the Dodgers benefit from never happens. So, how much of the local media rights do the Dodgers ultimately shelter from revenue sharing over the life of the 25-year deal? It\u2019s somewhere around $6 billion. That advantage is likely to stay with the Dodgers, even if somehow the owners were able to strongarm the players into a cap system when the latest labor deal expires on December 1st of this year.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bottom line: It appears Joon Lee was incorrect in his report cited in Awful Announcing and that I wrote an entire article yesterday based on that. It\u2019s not the first time I\u2019ve been wrong and it likely won\u2019t be the last. Hopefully, this article sets the record straight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After I posted this article Tuesday citing a Joon Lee report on the Dodgers supposedly not paying their…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":549417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[2442,241349,241347,219788,1884,1266,80057,62,22888,241348,67,132,68,2386],"class_list":["post-549416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-dodgers","tag-fair-market-value","tag-frank-mccourt","tag-joon-lee","tag-major-league-baseball","tag-mlb","tag-revenue-sharing","tag-sports","tag-the-dodgers","tag-tv-deal","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-yankees"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115973353864824424","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}