The Washington Nationals filed a petition Monday to certify a committee’s ruling that the Orioles and the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network will owe just under $320.5 million in television rights fees for the right to broadcast their games for the 2022 to 2026 seasons, according to documents filed with the Supreme Court of New York.
After the two teams were unsuccessful at agreeing on the “fair market value” of the Nationals’ license fees for the ongoing five-year period, Major League Baseball’s three-person Revenue Sharing Definitions Committee met May 20 in New York and determined that the Orioles would owe about $72.8 million per year for 2022 to 2023 and $58.3 million for 2024 to 2026.
The Nationals and Orioles didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
While MASN has been the subject of lengthy litigation for almost the entirety of its existence, a timely court ruling by New York Supreme Court Judge Andrew Borrok and no further pushback by the Orioles would ensure the two clubs have an agreement for the distribution of MASN’s rights fees in place for future seasons for the first time since they began negotiations in 2012.
MASN was established in 2005 when the Montreal Expos moved to Washington, a city former owner Peter Angelos claimed as part of the Orioles’ media territory. Then-MLB commissioner Bud Selig compensated Angelos by awarding the Orioles the right to broadcast Nationals games on MASN, of which the Orioles owned a supermajority stake. As part of the deal, the Orioles agreed to pay the Nationals a fixed amount in TV rights fees for the first seven years — a provision the Nationals called in Monday’s filing “heavily lopsided terms.”
In 2012, the two sides started negotiating license fees for five-year periods at a time. For both the periods of 2012 to 2016 and 2017 to 2021, negotiations between the Orioles and Nationals hit a standstill and wound up in court. MLB’s Revenue Sharing Definitions Committee ultimately devised an “established methodology” for determining the rights fees, handing down rulings that were approved by the New York Supreme Court in 2019 and 2023, respectively.
The Nationals and Orioles once again turned to the committee — currently composed of Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort, Milwaukee Brewers owner Mark Attanasio and Boston Red Sox chairman Tom Werner — for the ongoing period, but the timing offers optimism that the two sides can avoid ugly, public spats in court moving forward.
Orioles owner David Rubenstein purchased the team from the Angelos family last offseason and spoke in the days leading up to his formal introduction of his desire to “take this [MASN situation] away from the lawyers and give it back to the business people to resolve.”
He hired veteran business executive Catie Griggs away from the Seattle Mariners in July to be the club’s President of Business Operations and she oversaw a front office shakeup this fall that included making longtime team executive Greg Bader the executive vice president and general manager of MASN — a newly created position. Griggs told The Baltimore Sun in October that her first call upon Bader accepting the position was to “our friends over at the Nationals” and the club was moving forward planning to broadcast both teams’ games in 2025 and beyond.
The changes come at a critical juncture in the regional sports network business, with streaming cutting deep into local TV revenue and over a dozen MLB teams still sorting out the mess created by Diamond Sports when it filed for bankruptcy in March 2023. A source familiar with MASN’s thinking told The Baltimore Sun in December that the network is exploring ways to remain competitive in the rapidly changing market, including “direct-to-consumer” streaming.
In July, the Orioles issued a news release that MASN viewership for their games was up 35% at the midpoint of the season compared to the 2023 campaign, citing Nielsen ratings.
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