Yahoo: Padres’ Carlos Quentin to appeal eight-game ban for brawl with Zack Greinke, Dodgers

San Diego Padres outfielder Carlos Quentin will appeal the eight-game suspension he received after inciting a brawl during which Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Zack Greinke broke his left collarbone.
After Greinke hit Quentin on the arm with a 3-2 pitch in the sixth inning of a one-run game, the 30-year-old bull-rushed the mound at Petco Park. Greinke threw his glove off, stood his ground and got trucked, swallowed by a pile of Dodgers and Padres who cleared the benches.
Greinke will have surgery and is expected to be sidelined for around two months.
[Related: A-Rod reportedly bought Biogenesis documents]
Eight games, meanwhile, is among the stiffer penalties MLB has assessed for a player charging the mound – equal to what Nyjer Morgan received in Sept. 2010.
Major League Baseball, which announced the suspension and appeal Friday night, wanted to ensure Quentin missed the Padres’ series with the Dodgers that begins Monday – and a source expects the appeal to be settled before then. Considering the way Thursday night’s melee ended – with Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp and Quentin nose-to-nose in the stadium bowels, needing to be separated by teammates and security – the suspension would allow the teams to cool off before their next series June 3-5.

ESPN LA: Dodgers launching sports TV network

The Los Angeles Dodgers announced Monday their plans to launch a regional sports network funded almost entirely by Time Warner Cable, a scenario one baseball source says is exactly the type of deal MLB had feared: A team setting up a shell company of sorts in order to pay less in revenue sharing.

The new ownership group, which bought the team out of bankruptcy court in April 2012 for a record $2.1 billion, said it has created a company called American Media Productions that will start broadcasting Dodgers games in 2014 on a channel called SportsNet LA. Time Warner Cable, the largest carrier in the area, will be the network’s first distributor.

MLB’s revenue-sharing rules allow teams to start their own broadcast networks and to keep anything above and beyond the fair-market value of the TV rights (set at $84 million per year for the Dodgers plus a 4% boost per year during the bankruptcy court negotiations), provided that the team is assuming significant risk in starting the network. This deal is structured in a way that essentially places all of the risk on TWC, with the Dodgers themselves assuming almost none - so the question to be resolved is whether and to what extent the additional revenue from the contract (reportedly $7 billion over 25 years) must be shared.