Reports: Deal is worth as much as $8 billion.

OMG.

love how they have a picture of gonzalez lumbering into home about to be tagged out.

tripon, you better stay in touch. pretty soon the only way we'll be able to afford going to a game is my freebies.

all i can say is it looks like those guggenheim guys had a long game in mind. the dodgers are about to take a quantum leap into the same rarefied air occupied by the yanks and sox. i think it makes sense. L.A. is a huge underexpoited market. the murdoch ownership was too disorganized to see it, and frank mccourt was a clown without enough dough to make these kinds of plays. with the lakers sliding into mediocrity, the door is open for the dodgers to really capture L.A.

their biggest obstacle is finding a way to get the right players. ned colletti is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but a lot of people were saying that about sabean a couple of years ago.

in the immortal words of joaquin andujar, in baseball youneverknow.

I was just reading a 1978 Sporting News article about the inequities of local media deals, lamenting that the Royals only got $350k a year, while the mighty Red Sox got over $2.4 MILLION!!!!

tripon, you better stay in touch. pretty soon the only way we'll be able to afford going to a game is my freebies.

Haha. That's the only way I can go to the game as is.

Meanwhile, Shakin is reporting season-tix sales are jumping about 55% from last season (17K to 26K-27K).

Meanwhile the 2013 Cub payroll is $96 M.

I had no idea the Cubs had grabbed Nate Schierholz -- that actually looks sensible. Not to worry, they have balanced it by not kicking Ian Stewart to the curb and he's back for $2M.

This deal is a monster. The rumored deal with Fox in November was supposedly $6-7 billion over 25 years. The Time Warner numbers are rumored to be $7-8 billion over 20 years.

I still can't wrap my head around the money being thrown around here. The simple AAV of the deal is about $375M if the rumored numbers are accurate. I don't want to do exact calculations, but let's say the US has 4% annual inflation over the life of the deal (high, but perhaps plausible). Then $1 now will be the equivalent of $2.19 in 20 years. We can get a ballpark estimate of the current-dollar value of the deal by finding a Year 1 value that, when inflation is computed, averages out with the Year 20 value to equal the AAV. It turns out that with the 4% inflation estimate, $240M in Year 1 will be the equivalent of $526M in Year 20, which averages out to $383M, close enough for our purposes. So Time Warner is conservatively paying the 2013 equivalent of about $235M-$240M annually, which is absolutely nuts. And a (probably) more accurate estimate of 3% inflation would make the 2013-equivalent AAV about $270M. How many people are going to watch the Dodgers on TV on even a semi-regular basis? Are non-TV outlets (like streaming) going to make a substantial difference? Even in a media market as big as LA, I just don't see how this kind of money makes sense.

I still can't wrap my head around the money being thrown around here. The simple AAV of the deal is about $375M if the rumored numbers are accurate. I don't want to do exact calculations, but let's say the US has 4% annual inflation over the life of the deal (high, but perhaps plausible). Then $1 now will be the equivalent of $2.19 in 20 years. We can get a ballpark estimate of the current-dollar value of the deal by finding a Year 1 value that, when inflation is computed, averages out with the Year 20 value to equal the AAV. It turns out that with the 4% inflation estimate, $240M in Year 1 will be the equivalent of $526M in Year 20, which averages out to $383M, close enough for our purposes. So Time Warner is conservatively paying the 2013 equivalent of about $235M-$240M annually, which is absolutely nuts. And a (probably) more accurate estimate of 3% inflation would make the 2013-equivalent AAV about $270M. How many people are going to watch the Dodgers on TV on even a semi-regular basis? Are non-TV outlets (like streaming) going to make a substantial difference? Even in a media market as big as LA, I just don't see how this kind of money makes sense

I think it's worth noting that the Fed is willing to allow up to... 2.5% inflation, maybe a bit more, for the duration of the recovery, maybe a bit longer. I think it's likely one of Ben Bernanke's successor's during that post-recovery stretch is going to be tighter than Paul Volcker after drinking 3 bottles of Pepto Bismol.

...which is to say, wow. TW just cut a serious check. Good on the Dodgers, good on MLB. With the NFL running headlong into the emerging CTE scandal (which will probably seriously effect baseball vis a vis catchers at some point), I think there's a distinct chance that the football gets stigmatized in a way similar to boxing over the next couple of decades. That would put in MLB in prime position to reclaim its rightful throne, or at least some additional market share. This is clearly a bet in that direction, along with sports remaining relatively TIVO/DVR-proof.