6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

Al Yellon a couple days ago posted a piece about MLBAM being sold to Disney in a $1.5 billion deal. The upshot of this is that every MLB team will get $50 million in cash off the bat, but it also suggests something else: MLBAM, which has been a cash cow for the league, is going away at the exact moment cord-cutting continues to be a problem for cable TV. There's something about this deal that reminds me of the Yankees getting out from YES Network, which now seems prescient: better to let someone else figure out how to sell those ad dollars, and take whatever they want off the top.

Along those lines, ESPN is now launching its own streaming service, which looks from the outside like a Pyrrhic victory. As Techcrunch explains,

"A streaming service, while it might attract sports fans who have cut the cord, won’t solve ESPN’s profit problems. Instead it will exacerbate them. Why? Because ESPN will continue to lose the millions upon millions of cable subscribers who pay for it but never watch it. Losing $7.21 from each non-watcher is going to be a revenue killer. There is no possible way the universe of sports fans who want ESPN can make up that revenue, even if they’re charged more for a streaming service."

(The above was quoted in the story text, but it's unclear from context who was being quoted. Edit: it's an excerpt of this Bloomberg News story.) This is a problem of long-standing I first noticed with the Dodgers and their cable TV deal; there's simply no way the insane TV rights deals stand up without mandatory bundling. Things are going to get tighter for everyone in this space, and soon.

Update 2017-08-23: One aspect of this that has bothered me from the beginning is the same sense I got when the Guggenheim Group bought the Dodgers for $2.1 billion, and that is that this is predicated on revenue streams that simply cannot exist in the real world. (Even my rough contemporaneous pencil test showed the Dodgers couldn't milk that stream for the kind of dough they were getting out of bundled cable deals.) I'll spend some time digging and see if I can get MLBAM subscriber numbers somewhere. Also, it's important to know for return-on-investment figures that Disney earlier bought 33% of BAMTech for $1 billion, so their total investment appears to be $2.5 billion for (effectively) the whole magilla, or at least a majority stake.

It appears that MLBAM as of two years ago had 3.5 million subscribers, though this LA Times article doesn't mention how many are MLB.TV subscribers. But assume that 90% of them are paying for MLB.TV at $112.99/year. That means revenues are

3.5M subscribers * .9 * $112.99 subscriber^-1*year^-1 = $356M/year

It's not implausible that they might be able to make money under this scenario, but it omits the costs of carriage for MLB, MiLB, PGA, and other content.

Labels: broadcasters, dodgers, tv

I missed Jered Weaver's no-no on account of being out of town and immersed at the time, but Diane Pucin of the Times has an interesting coda to Wednesday's historic game: apparently Victor Rojas and Mark Gubicza did not inform their viewers that a no-hitter was in progress.

"Some people say jinxes have no place in sports, but that's just how I am," Rojas said. "I didn't move from my position after the third inning, I didn't move any paper. I put my pens back in the same spot. That's just who I am."

I actually agree with Charley Steiner, and, unsurprisingly, the Giants' great broadcaster Jon Miller here:

"Why are you keeping that a secret from your audience?" Steiner said. "In the 21st century we have this thing called the Internet. People in Swaziland know a no-hitter is going on. If you have those baseball superstitions from 40 years ago, OK, but do you not have some obligation to inform the audience?"

Jon Miller, another Hall of Fame baseball broadcaster, said he has no problem calling a no-hitter a no-hitter. "I feel like I have a responsibility to my audience, to the station, to the network, to say what's going on," Miller said.

"Plus, I want to maximize my audience. If someone hears from me about a no-hitter, he might call others or text or email and that helps my audience get larger. Some guys use all kinds of euphemisms, talking about 'no runs, nothing at all,' they make a game of it. I just think, if it's a big story, mention it. But it's a quaint old baseball thing. I don't blame anybody for doing a game any way they want."

Weaver, of course, couldn't be bothered with one superstition about no-hitters, and that is returning to the same spot on the bench. I'll leave that bit to the story, but it's got a funny ending.

Labels: angels, broadcasters

Of a heart attack; he was 75. Lookout Landing has a fine eulogy:

It's weird when these things happen. When Ernie Harwell died, it didn't mean much to me. When Harry Kalas died, it didn't mean much to me. Harry Caray, Jack Buck, Chick Hearn, and so on - their deaths didn't stop me in my place. News of Dave's passing did. I lost my grandfather a few weeks ago and Dave's passing doesn't affect me in the same way, but it does still feel like a death in the family, just because it resonates so strongly within a tight group of people. People from Los Angeles or Denver or Kansas City won't feel about this the way that we do, and we shouldn't expect them to, but many of them understand. Most fans understand that, while another team's long-time announcer may not mean much to them, they mean the world to the listeners at home. There's a bond that forms, and it stirs this strong, fierce devotion.

It's a devotion that, in many ways, may be even stronger than one's devotion to a team. When a team is good, you're all about it, and you're brimming with enthusiasm. When a team is lousy, though, one becomes objective, and critical. That objectivity and criticism isn't there with announcers like Dave. Not nearly to the same degree. I think we were all aware of some of Dave's flaws in his later years, but none of us thought worse of him because of them, the way we think worse of the M's for some of their drawbacks. I know, myself, while there's no statistical measure of narrator quality, I'd argue until I was blue in the face that Dave was the best there ever was.

Back when I first started this blog, I had a lot more personal connections to Mariners bloggers; my favorite among them, Mariners Wheelhouse, long ago went into retirement after being active only a year. Looking at Vinny's age, I only hope I don't have to endure such stuff myself any time soon.

Labels: broadcasters, mariners, obituaries

Joe Morgan and Jon Miller will no longer call ESPN Sunday Night Baseball games. The sports network is pulling the plug on its association with Joe Morgan, while giving Jon Miller the radio desk duties for that same game. The new team will consist of Dan Shulman calling the game with Orel Hirsheiser performing color commentary.

Labels: broadcasters

Yahoo's David Brown interviews Vin Scully, and the results are actually worth reading. Scully is so famously self-deprecating that a lot of interviews with him aren't all that compelling; he would rather talk about almost anything else besides himself. Excerpt:

DB: So, you will not use the washroom after the game starts?

VS: No, no.

DB: Even though there's two or three minutes between innings?

VS: No, in fact the one time [I get up] — they all kid me about it — in the seventh inning at Dodger Stadium, the crowd all stands for "God Bless America" and "Take Me Out To The Ball Game." And I use that time to walk the length of the hallway, because I sit for a long, long time. I mean, I'm in the car, I get to the ballpark, I sit and prepare, I go in and eat and I sit. I come back and sit. By the seventh inning, I've been sitting a long, long time. So I like to use the time just to walk up and down the hallway. So where it's the "Seventh Inning Stretch" for most, it's the "Seventh Inning Walk" for me [laughs].

Labels: broadcasters, dodgers

No. Really. He just bumped his head, which is why he was admitted to the freaking hospital.

Labels: broadcasters, dodgers

Son of former Angels manager Cookie Rojas, Victor Rojas has been tabbed to replace the late Rory Markus in the Angels' TV booth. It's an odd choice all things considered, but I also haven't heard him call any games; I certainly missed his MLB Network calls of the Caribbean World Series. He was also a broadcaster in the radio and TV booths for the Texas Rangers, and in 2003 for the Diamondbacks on radio.

Labels: angels, broadcasters, tv

Insert comment here about the general decline of awards.

Vin Scully also picked up the "Chick Hearn Award" from that same group. I imagine by now he has a storage unit somewhere in the Valley where he keeps most of them.

Labels: broadcasters, ex-angels, radio, tv