![\"Championship](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1769485937_775_0x0.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Los Angeles Dodgers have been winning on the field, but also winning at the bottom line through an advantage in their $8 billion TV deal. (Photo by Katelyn Mulcahy\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Getty Images<\/p>\n
In the frenzied state of whether the Los Angeles Dodgers have an unfair economic advantage \u2013 especially after Kyle Tucker signed his record four-year, $240 million deal with the club<\/a> \u2013 talks of a salary cap have swirled. Now, talk has surfaced that MLB gave the Dodgers a sweetheart deal with their television deal that shelters them from paying all they could with revenue sharing around the regional sports network deal. How accurate is it? It\u2019s more complicated than you might think.<\/p>\n It\u2019s rare that news from 15 years ago takes front and center, but that\u2019s what has happened<\/a> over the last week. The headline catcher was that the Dodgers aren\u2019t paying as much in revenue sharing as they with their $8.35 billion media rights deal, adding to their bottom line and giving them a leg up on the other 29 clubs.<\/p>\n That may be true, but how we got there is anything but simple.<\/p>\n We have to go back to 2011-12, when prior owner Frank McCourt was using the Dodgers as a bit of a personal money playground when he and his wife went into one of the most costly divorces in California history. McCourt was looking to do a 17-year, $2.7 billion deal with FOX that was key to the divorce settlement, to which then commissioner Bud Selig rejected, saying the deal was not in the best interest of baseball. Ultimately, McCourt and MLB reached an agreement for the sale of the Dodgers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Los Angeles Dodgers and Major League Baseball announced that they have agreed today to a court-supervised process to sell the team and its attendant media rights in a manner designed to realize maximum value for the Dodgers and their owner, Frank McCourt. The Blackstone Group LP will manage the sale process,\u201d said a statement from MLB and the Dodgers in November of 2011.<\/p>\n That bankruptcy sale and the future of the Dodgers\u2019 local media rights loom over the here and now. It\u2019s not that MLB granted the Dodgers a sweetheart deal with their revenue sharing. It\u2019s that the courts had to determine what those media rights might look like when they finally came to fruition.<\/p>\n In October of 2012, I went about tackling what is now bubbled to the surface with the Dodgers for Baseball Prospectus (Do the Dodgers Really Have a ‘Secret Deal’ to Avoid Revenue-Sharing?<\/a>). Since there have been some additional twists to the story since then, it\u2019s worth going over it.<\/p>\n During the bankruptcy sale, McCourt sought to determine what the \u201cfair-market value\u201d of the Dodgers\u2019 media rights might ultimately be, which could be higher than what he had been seeking with FOX when the sale finally closed. These \u201cspecial terms\u201d determined in the court-controlled proceedings amounted to $84 million annually, with escalators. By setting that figure, it put in motion the revenue-sharing terms for a future deal: the league taking 34% and distributing it to the league’s payees.<\/p>\n As history shows, that projected \u201cfair-market value\u201d was woefully short.<\/p>\n Guggenheim Partners eventually purchased the Dodgers for $2.15 billion in 2012<\/a>, and said that a key part of their offer was the \u201cspecial terms\u201d for the projected local media rights. In 2013, the Dodgers went 50\/50 with Time Warner Cable to launch Spectrum Sportsnet LA, the new regional sports network launched for the Dodgers in 2014, is a 25-year deal valued at $8.35 billion. <\/p>\n According to the LA Times<\/a>, the average annual value of the deal is $334 million. As is often the case with media rights, the amount started lower than that, and with escalators, the value will eventually exceed the yearly $334 million when the 25-year deal expires.<\/p>\n Needless to say, the league and other owners weren\u2019t happy with the 34% of $84 million annually that had come out of the bankruptcy proceedings, but the Dodgers pointed out that those terms were driven by court proceedings. <\/p>\n MLB and the Dodgers did get those figures adjusted, but even so, they come woefully short of the AAV the Dodgers are getting. From the LA Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n After negotiations, MLB and Guggenheim made a 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