Judge rules in favor of Orioles in dispute with Nationals, MLB over broadcast fees
Even as the baseball season ends, the battle being waged by the Baltimore Orioles against the Washington Nationals and Major League Baseball over broadcast rights fees from the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, aka MASN, continues on.
According to the Washington Post, the latest development took place on Wednesday when New York State Supreme Court Justice Lawrence K. Marks tossed out an MLB arbitration ruling from July 2014 which favored the Nationals and MLB.
[Elsewhere: Bryce Harper called Jonathan Papelbon in order to repair their relationship]
According to the report, the judge’s ruling means the Nationals will receive $40 million in annual TV rights fees from MASN per year, $20 million less than the amount awarded by the MLB panel. A clear victory for the Orioles, who own a stake in MASN, and the network itself, which challenged last summer’s ruling due to concerns about a conflict of interest from parties involved in the arbitration panel.
The Nationals’ choice for legal representation — the New York firm Proskauer Rose — was questioned by MASN, because the firm also represented Major League Baseball and the three teams that made up the arbitration panel: the Pirates, Rays and Mets. Marks agreed with MASN’s concerns.
This reminds us of the good old days in professional wrestling, when Vince McMahon would stack the deck against “Stone Cold” Steve Austin or The Rock by appointing his henchman to serve as referee and to fulfill other ringside duties to assure the outcome he desired. Perhaps that wasn’t the intention of the league or the Nationals, but they obviously didn’t do enough to squash those concerns in the eye of the court.
In fact, Judge Marks gave them quite a scolding in his written ruling.
“Had MLB, the abitrators, the Nationals and/or Proskauer taken some reasonable steps to address petitioners’ concerns about the Nationals’ choice of counsel in the arbitration — or indeed any step at all — the Court might well have been compelled to uphold the arbitral award,” Marks wrote in the ruling. “… But MASN and the Orioles have established that their well-documented concerns fell on entirely deaf ears. Under the circumstances, the Court concludes that this complete inaction objectively demonstrates an utter lack of concern for fairness of the proceeding that is ‘so consistent with basic principles of justice’ that the award must be vacated.”
A written mic drop if we ever saw one.
The judge did not mandate the next move for both sides should they seek to continue this battle, but urged them to seek redress from a “neutral dispute resolution process.” We would expect that both sides will carry on until one side or the other gets a clear victory, so this is likely far from over.
As for some history.
MASN broadcasts both the Nationals and Orioles games but the Orioles have a controlling stake in the network as part of a 2005 agreement brokered by baseball and then-commissioner Bud Selig to allow the relocation of the Montreal Expos to Washington. The D.C. area had long been considered part of the Orioles’ broadcast market, and Orioles owner Peter Angelos opposed the relocation.
The dispute over the size of the Nationals’ broadcast fees dates back to 2012, when the clubs were unable to agree on the Nationals’ rights fees.
Like we said, this has been going on for several years. Obviously there are several layers to it, but in the end it’s all about the money and claiming ones territory.
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Mark Townsend is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @Townie813
