After more than a decade of lawsuits and public recriminations, the MASN drama is finally over. On Monday morning, MLB made an announcement along with the Orioles and Nationals which stated that the parties have resolved “all issues related to the MASN dispute.”
The resolution is pretty simple: They’re getting a divorce. The league announcement said that for 2025, Nationals games will continue to be televised on MASN and this will exist on a one-year contract. Following this year, the Nationals will be able to seek their own arrangement for television rights into the future. The Orioles will have nothing to do with it any more. The announcement also stated that all disputes from the past regarding the media rights, including litigation, will be dismissed. It’s over.
Over the past couple of years, as different conglomerates of regional sports networks have gone under, MLB under commissioner Rob Manfred has been working to get all teams under one umbrella instead of having so many separate television fiefdoms. The peculiar arrangement of the Orioles and Nationals under MASN was one of the remaining hurdles to bringing it all together. I’m not surprised that they finally managed to do it.
The settlement is pretty much that the Orioles will stop fighting that they lost. When the Angelos family still controlled the team, it almost seemed like a personal vendetta against both the league and the Nationals ownership. Those parties weaseled their way out of the agreement made between MLB and the Orioles when the Expos moved into what had been solely O’s territory under the league’s rules. (The Nationals and MLB surely have a different telling of events.)
I’ve always felt Manfred’s behavior regarding this issue was remarkably similar to what Darth Vader tells Lando Calrissian in Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back: “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” The Orioles were unable to get any court to agree that the various public statements made by Manfred on the issue, combined with the fact that Manfred controlled who would sit on the committee that ruled on television rights, meant that the O’s could not get a fair shake under MLB’s in-house revenue committee.
The David Rubenstein ownership group did not inherit the personal vendetta against the league over the rights question. I would guess they probably had a sense of what direction MASN was going and that this impacted the purchase price for the franchise. The network was meant to be a financial advantage for the Orioles as the price for letting the Nationals set up shop.
It’s been a while since the league started chipping away at that and by now there’s not much left, if anything. At this point, I think the financial impact to the Orioles of the team-owned network getting a divorce is probably minimal.
My immediate question, which will not be answered today: Does MASN even continue to survive beyond 2025 with only one team worth of games to broadcast? Manfred is still going to want to fold in the Orioles digital rights into the league-wide blackout-free arrangement he’s been assembling in the wake of other bankruptcies. With MASN being one of the holdouts in having in-market streaming without a cable subscription, more fans will maybe even get a chance to watch.
Whatever comes next will probably look different. Maybe it won’t even keep the name MASN. There’s not much point in pretending to be the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network any more if it’s just Orioles games. That is something that will be solved for another day. For now, all the Baltimore sportswriters who never have to write about the legal saga again can rejoice.
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