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

Following yesterday's announcement that the NBA has suspended its season following yesterday's scheduled games, the NHL has suspended its entire season. Also, MLB has suspended spring training indefinitely according to the Los Angeles Times.

Update: The MLB regular season will be “delayed” by two weeks.

Labels: angels, dodgers

If it is possible for the Dodgers to have a more ignominious end to their season, I cannot think of it. Battered in Game 3, Dave Roberts sent Yu Darvish out for second helpings in a win-or-die scenario; Darvish made it clear early that the second option was his choice. The Astros out pitched the Dodgers, whose offense never bothered to show up. Honestly, that was the team I watched through much of August and September, the hellacious losing streak that made you wonder which team would be playing in October.

Dylan Hernandez' LAT piece pulls no punches. I think he oversteps by claiming

The Rangers probably knew something. They probably knew he was as likely to perform how he did in this World Series as he was of ever realizing his breathtaking potential. Darvish made two postseason starts for the Rangers and lost both.

 The Dodgers knew that too, but I suspect they were hopeful the better pitching environment of Dodger Stadium would attenuate those bad outings. Nevertheless, Dave Roberts leaving him in for so long was a critical failure; he had to be on a very short leash. Darvish got only two swings-and-misses total in the ten batters he faced, a bad sign that Roberts ignored. Not that it mattered with the offense failing; the two runs the Astros collected in that first inning would be enough.

So, congratulations to the now American League Astros, who win their first title ever for America's fourth-largest city. The Dodgers have their work cut out for them in the offseason.

ESPN Box • MLB Recap

Labels: astros, dodgers, postseason, world series

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

Six years ago today, MLB ousted the contentious and rapacious McCourts as the owners of the Dodgers. Their tenure as owners would be marred by problems with parking lots, and in particular, the problem Bryan Stow had. This would be a happy anniversary if not for the years-long fight over cable TV revenues that have thus far failed to materialize. The price of ousting the McCourts, apparently, was $2.1 billion, a figure largely hoisted on the now-obviously dim prospects of extracting absurdly generous concessions from a new cable TV network that thus far remains off the cable boxes of most Southern California fans. The math is so absurd, and so large are Dodger salaries, it is impossible to imagine this stalemate going on much longer, but the Guggenheim group seems set on their course. The one advantage of being out of market now is that at least I get to see the Dodgers. It is more than outweighed by being two timezones east, so the Blue finish most of their games after my bedtime. I can only hope my in-market friends get to see their team on the TV some year soon.

Labels: dodgers, history, tv

Bill Plaschke, improbably, has managed to write a column on the Dodgers' first flirtation with actual negotiations, which appears to be more cynical than real:

That Time Warner Cable has offered to cut the price of SportsNet LA by 30% is admirable, but that the offer is good for only one year is ridiculous.

Would you make that deal? Buy somebody's car for one year at a deeply discounted price, then take your hands off the wheel and agree to renegotiate?

As expected, Plaschke misunderstands the nature of the contract to justify his dudgeon— its more like renting an apartment than buying a car — but his admonition to "[m]ake the discount permanent" is entirely sound, and likely, doesn't go far enough. The reality is the Dodgers are not going to get that $5/head, now nor at any point in the future; bankruptcy looms. That the team uses Vin Scully's last season as a chit is unconscionable manipulation. I did not think it possible that the new ownership would be materially worse than the McCourts, but at least in this one dimension, they are: at least Frank never took the Dodgers off the air.

Labels: dodgers, mccourts, tv

Bill Plaschke brings the sad yet predictable news that SportsNet LA plans on halving its coverage of spring training games from 31 to 16.

No, this is not about the importance of watching spring exhibitions, which become awfully boring when all the good players hit the golf courses by the fifth inning. No, SportsNet LA is not alone in taking a spring break, as most teams televise only a smattering of games — and even KLAC radio is broadcasting only 14 games from Arizona. And yes, it makes sense when Time Warner Cable officials say they are cutting back because of lousy midweek afternoon ratings.

But when the Dodgers and Time Warner Cable continue to deny 60% of Southern California households a chance to watch their team because of ego and greed, then each misstep becomes more galling than the previous one, and every stumble becomes emblematic of a legendary fall.

At this point in the three-year debacle, it is worth wondering whether this might be the worst team-TV partnership in modern sports history. If the Dodgers keep Vin Scully from Los Angeles during his final season, that seals it.

The reason I say this is predictable is due to the fact that the channel is hemorrhaging money, and so they have to cut costs somewhere. Spring training games, broadcast in the afternoons with poor viewership, are an obvious place to trim.

It's rare that I can endorse a Plaschke column in its entirety (or even majority); it seems to happen about twice a year now. But here it is.

Labels: dodgers, tv

Per ESPN, Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mike Piazza were the only players voted into the Hall of Fame. Griffey, who is by no means an inner-circle Hall of Famer, garnered a 99% vote, which I presume is mostly a protest at the steroid era. Piazza is the lowest draftee ever to go to Cooperstown, and Griffey the highest (first overall):

While Griffey was selected first in the 1987 amateur draft and became the first No. 1 pick to make the Hall, Piazza was selected by the Los Angeles Dodgers with the 1,390th pick on the 62nd round in 1998. Since the draft started in 1965, the lowest draft pick elected to the Hall was John Smoltz, taken with the No. 574 pick in the 22nd round in 1985.

Update: I should explain a bit on my remarks about Griffey. There's a 30-point JAWS dropoff between Mickey Mantle and Junior, the largest between any two players above the mean. Partly that was from memory, so if you want to disagree based on the fact that he's well above the mean of 70.4 JAWS, feel free to do so.

Labels: dodgers, ex-dodgers, hall of fame, mariners, reds

David Dobbs in Wired has some fantastic stories about Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest left-handed pitchers ever to throw the ball (and until Randy Johnson, arguably the greatest). The whole story is worth your time (it also gets into why the curveball is so effective: it combines physical movement with an optical illusion), but I wanted to focus on this excerpt:

2. A Koufax story I read a few years back, either in Leary’s bio of him or perhaps an Angell piece. Koufax, retired almost 20 years and in his 40s, was pitching batting practice to the Dodgers (whom he often helped coach) between post-season series in the mid-1980s. This was the great-hitting Dodger line-up with Sax, Garvey, Baker, Cey, and others. Koufax is just throwing easy minor-league 45-year-old man fastballs for BP, letting the hitters groove their swings. One of the hitters calls for the famous curveball. This Koufax usually didn’t throw, lest it aggravate his elbow. But this hitter wanted to see the thing, see if he could hit it, so Koufax indulges him.

This is a major league hitter who knows what pitch is coming, batting against a man in his mid-40s.

Curve comes in, drops like a stone — a swing and a miss.

Hitter calls for another. Same result.

Several more; the same.

By now the hitter’s teammates, watching, are in hysterics. They’re howling. The batter gives up, walks off, tells his buddies, Fine then, you try it. And one by one they do. This great Dodger line-up comes up, every hitter knowing what pitch he’s getting, and no one can connect. Koufax is 45 or so — and with one pitch, pre-announced, he is unhittable.

...

As the story goes, manager Lasorda walked out to the mound and, using the pretext he wanted to protect Koufax’s arm, asked him to stop — but to Koufax he said, Cut it out already, I don’t want my hitters mentally destroyed just before a post-season series because they can’t hit a one-pitch man in his 40s.

Labels: dodgers

With the Dodgers' $8 billion/25 year TV deal in the can but not realized (still), Time Warner taking on water to the tune of a $1 billion loss over the life of the contract, and the proposed merger with Comcast dead, it's been a terrible year for Dodger fans hoping to see their team on TV, and mostly without hope. Or it was, anyway, until Time Warner bid and won on the consolation prize of Charter Communications, immediately expanding the reach of SportsNet LA. For customers on that network, nine innings of Vin Scully is a reality again.

But the money drain continues for that channel; they still have less than half their projected audience, and there's no other sign of them getting to an agreement with the remaining cable and satellite carriers. It's interesting, then, to take a look at one of the more commonly suggested answers to the problem of rising cable costs, a la carte purchase. Despite a great deal of belief in the idea that live sports are the last redoubt of cable TV, the reality is somewhat more complicated; for instance, only 35.7% of those polled said they would buy ESPN if it were offered as a separate channel. Similarly, the economics become highly questionable, to say the least.

Let's dig in by first taking a look at a recent Times story on the ratings boost provided by the Charter acquisition. Charter serves 300,000 subscribers, while Time Warner has "four times" that number, making 1.2 million for that carrier, or 1.5 million in all. An earlier LAT story suggests the total number is closer to two million, but it's unclear whether that includes San Diego County homes that would be in the Padres broadcast area and would not get SportsNet LA; for this discussion, I use the lower figure. If we take Time Warner's subscriber base and reverse the calculation that they're 30% of the market, the overall subscriber base should be 4 million.

As a sanity check, let's look at the dollar figures from the contract to make sure we're not missing something. The first year of the deal required Time Warner to pay the Dodgers $210 million, which means if we were to assume they merely broke even, that would be

$210M/year / $5/subscriber*month / 12 months/year = 3.5M subscribers

(For the purposes of simplicity, I round up the $4.90 per subscriber per month figure to $5.) So we know we're on the right side of these numbers; Time Warner has to make a profit somewhere (that's the extra 500,000 subscribers from our earlier calculation). Now that we know the size of the market, we can look at prior years' ratings to give us an indication of the number of people willing to fork over their hard-earned dough so they can root for the Dodgers.

Ratings vary quite a lot depending on whether a team is winning or not, and the Dodgers are no exception. Their successful 92-70 2013 season resulted in average per-game ratings of 154,000 viewers, where the mediocre 82-79 2011 season yielded an average of 65,000, less than half. While the 94-68 2014 season was even more successful than the prior year, the cable TV impasse sent ratings even lower, to an average of 40,000 viewers per game, the lowest figures in nearly two decades. So let us assume that the Dodgers are capable of averaging around 100,000 viewers per game, even though we know the variance is quite large. Let us also assume that each and every one of those viewers will be willing to pay for a subscription to see the Dodgers. In an a la carte scenario, that means we're going to divide the expected revenue by the number of viewers.

Get ready.

$210M/year / 12 months/year / 100,000 subscribers = $175/month*subscriber

One hundred seventy five dollars per month per subscriber. This monthly figure is more than the price of MLB.TV for the year. Nobody's going to pay that, and hardly anyone could afford it. In short, this isn't happening, now, or ever, unless the Dodgers give up their current salary structure.

Labels: dodgers, tv

Jon Weisman has a brief story up about how the Dodgers missed out on Willie Mays:

Jackie [Robinson] says the Dodgers blew a chance to land Willie Mays when he was a 16-year-old phenom with the Birmingham Black Barons. “The Dodger players were much impressed with Mays when we played an exhibition game with the Barons,” said Jackie. “The front office in Brooklyn was contracted, but Wid Mathews, Mr. Rickey’s assistant, turned down Willie because Wid said he couldn’t hit a curve ball.”

This is genuinely incredible, because Wid Mathews also wrote off Jackie Robinson  as "strictly the showboat type". It's one thing to be wrong about a player, but to clank so impressively on two Hall of Famers is something like a reverse Midas touch.

Labels: dodgers, history

I was unaware of this, but Dodgers organist Nancy Bea Hefley handed in her resignation in sorrow at her diminished role (she only plays "Take Me Out To The Ballgams" now, and perhaps three or four other numbers, a total of five minutes a night) — but was talked out of it.

"They said I had a job as long as I want the job, the job would not be open for anybody else," Hefley said. "I will be signing a new contract at the end of the year."

Whew. Bullet dodged.

Labels: dodger stadium, dodgers

A great couple of posts by Nathaniel Grow at Fangraphs about MLB's luxury tax and its erosive consequences for player salary. Salaries as a percentage of league revenue have been in dramatic decline since the inception of the luxury tax in 1996, particularly since peaking in 2003:

Overall, however, it appears that the luxury tax threshold has effectively become a de facto salary cap for many of MLB’s larger market teams, and thus represents an important contributing factor to the players’ declining share of MLB’s overall league revenues.

This is not insignificant. One of Bud Selig's signal achievements is two decades of labor peace, bought mostly on increasing revenue for the clubs and climbing salaries for free agents.

In hindsight, then, the MLBPA likely made a mistake by agreeing to a more restrictive luxury tax framework in the last several CBAs. And to the extent the union intends to address the players’ declining share of overall league revenues in the 2016 collective bargaining negotiations, modifying the luxury tax will likely prove to be an important piece of the puzzle.

 Counteracting this, to some degree, is the willingness of teams to sign their young stars to extended deals that buy out not only remaining arbitration years, but their early free agency terms. This has the side effect of raising the cost of the few players who do actually reach free agency despite being on the wrong side of 30, precisely because there are fewer of them. But in the main, the benefits adhere to owners, who now nab the lion's share of revenues. The explosion in TV deal revenues is largely going unshared with the players, for a curious reason:

Unlike ticket sales – which generally rise as a team improves on the field – television revenue is fixed via long-term broadcasting agreements. So while franchises can increase their in-stadium profits to some degree by spending more on payroll – thereby improving the quality of their team – the same is generally not true for television revenue. As a result, teams have little incentive to spend any added broadcasting profits on payroll (because, in economic terms, the added television revenue has not adjusted the team’s marginal revenue product).

The Dodgers are in some ways an anomaly in that regard, and we shall see just how much of that actually pans out in a deal that appears largely doomed. If the MLBPA has been content to let ownership gradually but dramatically increase its revenue stream without sharing, that may not last past the next round of negotiations. On the other hand, I have to believe that negotiators for both sides remember the crippling 1994 strike, how much it soured fans on the game, and how nobody wants that again.

Labels: contracts, dodgers, tv

You would be hard pressed to find a more remarked-upon or remarkable game than today's White Sox/Orioles tilt at an entirely empty Camden Yards, due to the rioting in Baltimore. The game itself was mostly noteworthy for its astonishing speed, completing nine innings in a barely-recognizable 2:03 despite the high-scoring offense.  If MLB rules people want to figure out how best to accelerate the pace of play, this game might well be a good place to start, an experiment otherwise impossible that yields an interesting result, just as shutting down all air traffic on September 11, 2001 yielded some interesting (or not) results. Taking the fans out of the park might be the most radical idea yet advanced to this end, but is it too much to imagine that showboating batters, the staged drama of walkup music, the endless preening of the pitcher between pitches might be considerably lowered in such an environment?

If any team can achieve such a thing, it's the Dodgers, who have staked what appears to be the vast majority of their revenue streams to television contracts, rather than seats in the park. While it might be overkill to suggest the team could play entirely without fans in the stadium, it could certainly operate financially without them, although their current TV contract's viability is in grave peril. Think of the advantages for the team: no parking hassles (or revenue), no more Brian Stows, no fan interference, no need for concessions or staffing. Security could be reduced by no less than two-thirds. This begins to sound better all the time.

ESPN Box • Recap

Update: Apparently the Orioles signed autographs for and tossed balls to fans that weren't there.

Labels: dodgers, orioles, recaps, tv, white sox

Bloomberg reports that the Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal is dead, after Comcast decided to pull out. (Warning: auto-play video at that link.) Almost certainly, this also means the Dodgers' TV deal with SportsNet LA will be renegotiated, possibly as a consequence of that entity going into bankruptcy. Probably good news, but not for Dodger TV fans, not soon, anyway.

Labels: dodgers, finances, tv

Comes a post from the New York Post about Time Warner taking a billion dollar hit to their bottom line thanks to the rapacious, unjustifiable contract for the Dodgers.

Sources told The Post that the market rate for the channel is more likely $3 per subscriber per month, meaning the charge will be almost $1 billion when adjusted over the life of the contract or in the region of $700 million in present-day terms.

“Comcast will be made whole,” said the source, suggesting this mess had to be cleaned up as a condition of Comcast’s proposed deal to acquire Time Warner Cable.

“Unless the deal [to merge Time Warner and Comcast] closes, there will not be another [Dodgers] season shown outside of Time Warner Cable. I don’t believe they’ll get carriage,” a source told The Post.

I would even go so far as to suggest that, if the entity that bought the rights is independent, the Dodgers could end up on the wrong side of a bankruptcy. It's hard for me to imagine that Time Warner didn't protect their interests in this way, but dumber things have happened.

Labels: dodgers, tv

The Times reported last week that the Dodgers are in talks to sell a minority share to a Korean partner, which I suppose should come as no surprise. This is a step one takes if one is starting to run low on cash, or otherwise wishes to diminish exposure to downside. Which is to say, the early ebullience of the Kasten era has given way to a more sober assessment of the likelihood the team's overarching flaw, its uncompleted TV deal. At this point, it seems to me, it's a question of when, not if, SportsNet LA will go into bankruptcy, and take the Dodgers with them.

Labels: dodgers, tv

It's hard to understand how anyone could be so thoroughly clueless that they thought this wouldn't be the outcome, but here we are in 2015, and the Dodgers still won't be on cable TV this year, report Bill Shaikin and Meg James.

"I'm very concerned," Dodgers Chairman Mark Walter said Thursday, at the conclusion of baseball's owners' meetings.

The Federal Communications Commission has until March 30 — six days before the Dodgers' season opener — to approve or reject a merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable. The FCC has delayed the proceedings twice and could do so again.

The other side of the table has some blunt words for the Dodgers' TV arm:

"Time Warner Cable and the Dodgers' front office owe fans the simple freedom to see Dodger games on TV without obligating every TV customer to bail out Time Warner for its reckless overspending," DirecTV said in a statement. Kasten declined to comment.

"Reckless overspending" is an understatement. We could be into 2016 before this goes away; the Dodgers have deep pockets. I still maintain a chain reaction bankruptcy is not impossible.

Labels: dodgers, tv

• Yesterday was so intense — all of it — that I can only say I believe it was the craziest 24 hours of any offseason in my memory. Jonah Keri's piece at Grantland mostly encapsulates my at-the-moment take on the deals as well:
  • Matt Kemp:

    L.A. may well have sold Kemp at exactly the right time. Friedman and GM Farhan Zaidi aren’t slaves to the recency effect, recognizing that Kemp’s strong finish in 2014 didn’t really change any of the other factors that had led to the longtime trade rumors, including the outfield logjam and his hefty contract. Instead of viewing Kemp’s elite .311/.372/.561 performance over the final 99 games of the season as a sign of rebirth, they viewed it as a boost in trade value that would allow them to more easily move a guy still owed $21 million–plus a year for five seasons.

  • Dee Gordon:

    Gordon is a fun guy to watch, but comparing his projections to, say, Emilio Bonifacio’s should help assure Dodgers fans that they might not be giving up all that much.

  • Howie Kendrick:

    Kendrick is one of the best second basemen in baseball, and he’ll make the Dodgers significantly better in 2015. ... To get Kendrick, of course, the Dodgers had to give up Heaney, whom they possessed for a nanosecond before flipping him to the Angels. Though Kendrick should be a big gain, Heaney could prove to be an even bigger loss, as he has a chance to be good … really good.

    Here, I'm relying on Keri's prospect smarts, but it's a rare case of getting a quality prospect for an established veteran with only limited control. It's important to note this kind of deal rarely happens anymore.
  • Jimmy Rollins:

    Like Kendrick, Rollins offers the Dodgers only one year of guaranteed team control. But in this case, the lone year is a feature rather than a bug, since L.A. has 20-year-old top shortstop prospect Corey Seager not far from the Show.

  • Brandon McCarthy:

    McCarthy is the riskiest of all the moves, considering the length of his contract and his past health concerns.

  Read. It. All. I'm a big fan of moving Kemp, even with the big salary ditch; it strikes me as an example of Branch Rickey's maxim that it's better to move a player a year too early than a year too late.
• No comment on the Angels moves as of yet, but I generally find myself in agreement. My comments on Kemp? Apply equally to Howie.
• I cleaned out a mess of stale sidebar links; if your blog hasn't been updated in two years, or if you aren't named Tommy Lasorda, you don't get special consideration. I practically don't update this one, but I'm the king of this here domain. Angels blogs especially took a lot of hits; it seems generally that blogs are an affectation of the 2000's, to vanish in this decade. My heart haz a sad.

If I don't see y'all until next year, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Labels: administrivia, angels, dodgers, trades

Everything but baseball these days seems interesting. T.J. Simers is retiring from the Register/, which should make sense if you were thinking about how likely it was the Register's plan was likely to work out. Of the two sports pages columnists in the LAT, he was the less objectionable, but only just; I think someone needs to write a retrospective of his material from that time. It's been almost a decade since Matt Welch tore him and Bill Plaschke a new one over their terrible coverage, but if we no longer have Simers to kick around, it may soon be the case that we have no one covering the Angels and Dodgers, save for house organs at mlb.com.

Labels: angels, dodgers, newspapers, retirements

Covered in many, many other places (especially Twitter), but Dr. Frank Jobe died at age 88, from causes undisclosed. If there is some reason he is not in the Hall of Fame, I do not know it.

Labels: dodgers, hall of fame