A June 28 article about the televising of Washington Nationals games incorrectly described the baseball team's ratings on WDCA (Channel 20). While the Baltimore Orioles have had higher ratings than the Nationals in the Washington area when Orioles games are shown on ComcastSportsNet and the Nationals are shown on WDCA, the Orioles have not had a larger audience when their games were on the Pax network. The article also said the Orioles have had higher ratings when they went head to head against the Nationals on television. In fact, the Nationals' opening-day game had higher ratings, and while the Orioles had higher average ratings in nine subsequent head-to-head games, they did not draw a larger audience in every one.
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Nats Caught in a TV Rundown
On many nights, the Nationals can only be watched by subscribers to RCN, a small cable provider, and customers of DirecTV, a satellite service.
(By Jonathan Newton -- The Washington Post)
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Cohen, however, denies that Comcast is after an equity stake of MASN. "We have never asked for and are not interested in an equity position in MASN," he said. Angelos did not respond to two requests to discuss MASN.
For now, the two sides are trying to win the hearts and minds of baseball fans and portray each other as the bad guy. Comcast likes to talk about its ties to the Washington community. MASN accuses it of betraying that same community, even as Comcast continues to broadcast Orioles games.
"Despite Comcast's disingenuous statements about its desire to distribute Nationals games 'to the largest possible fan base,' Comcast is currently preventing millions of viewers in the D.C. metropolitan area from seeing those games on its dominant cable television distribution network," MASN attorneys wrote in a complaint they filed with the Federal Communications Commission after Comcast's law suit. "It is doing so for reasons that flout this Commission's rules."
Over the weekend MASN began an advertising campaign urging baseball fans to call Comcast, Cox and two other system providers -- Adelphia and EchoStar -- to demand that they broadcast Nationals games.
As Angelos and Comcast fight it out, one party with a vital interest in the broadcast revenue of the Nationals has not even been chosen -- the team's future owners. MLB has asked for two bids from the groups competing for the team -- one for the team and one for the team and MLB's stake in MASN -- and is expected to choose a new owner in the next few months.
Members of potential ownership groups are reluctant to comment on the situation for fear of alienating Selig and MLB President Robert DuPuy, who will choose the new owners, but their concerns are obvious: a future in which Angelos decides what games to televise and how the team is marketed, not to mention one in which they forgo the $20 million that by some estimates a regional sports network owned by the Nationals could earn. Besides ticket sales, broadcast revenue is a baseball team's greatest source of income, and unlike ticket sales it is not subject to revenue sharing with other teams.
One source familiar with the bidding process estimates the deal with Angelos has driven down the value of the Nationals by tens of millions of dollars, but most of the eight bids submitted to MLB are believed to be between $300 million and $400 million for a team that MLB bought in 2002 for $120 million.
Staff writers Thomas Heath, Barry Svrluga and John Maynard contributed to this report.
