Thirteen years ago, on the final Sunday in September, Skip Schumaker struck out. It was the last out in the last game of the regular season.
For the Dodgers, no big deal: They had won the National League West, and the playoffs were four days away.
For Dodgers fans that subscribed to Cox Communications, it turned out to be the start of a bizarre and protracted blackout that cost viewers the final years of Vin Scully and the golden years of three World Series championships.
After 4,560 days, the blackout is over.
On Friday, for the first time in 13 years, Cox subscribers within the Dodgers’ broadcast territory will be able to watch the team on their local television home. Fans can find SportsNet LA on Channel 63 in Orange County, Channel 54 in Palos Verdes, Channel 36 in Santa Barbara and Channel 50 in Las Vegas.
How did this finally come to pass? Those channels no longer belong to Cox.
Charter Communications, the company responsible for getting SportsNet LA on as many cable, satellite and streaming options as possible, on Thursday closed its $34.5-billion purchase of Cox.
For Dodgers fans, the takeaway is this: It no longer matters that Cox did not want to pay Charter for the rights to air SportsNet LA. Charter made the 13 years of that moot by buying Cox.
Charter offers broadcast service under the Spectrum brand.
In 2013, with the team in the final year of its local television agreement with Fox Sports, the Dodgers announced it would launch a team-owned channel the following year.
In exchange for the rights to market and distribute that SportsNet LA channel, Time Warner Cable agreed to pay the Dodgers $8.35 billion over 25 years. It was the last great regional sports network deal, with traditional broadcast audiences about to fragment amid the rise of streaming and cord-cutting.
The guaranteed rights fees are as sure of a revenue stream as anything in baseball, and the Dodgers’ success amid all that cash is one of the triggers for major league owners in their push for a salary cap.
However, the great regional sports network deals relied on cable and satellite subscribers paying for every channel in a bundle, most of which viewers never watched.
With DirecTV leading the resistance, cable and satellite providers balked at signing up for SportsNet LA: a few dimes per month per subscriber for a news or entertainment channel was fine, but they drew the line at $5 per month subscriber for a baseball channel.
No major Los Angeles outlet besides Time Warner Cable carried SportsNet LA until 2016, and then only because Charter bought Time Warner Cable. Even then, less than half the households in the Los Angeles market could get SportsNet LA.
In 2020, DirecTV and AT&T struck a deal with Charter, not so much to liberate Dodgers fans as to help the parties maintain a shrinking base of subscribers amid a proliferation of video options.
“I think I can speak for a lot of people who will say this is, maybe, long overdue,” Dodgers star Justin Turner said then.
Six years later, as a longtime Cox subscriber excited to see SportsNet LA for the first time, your humble correspondent can say this: I think I can speak for a lot of people who will say this is definitely long overdue.
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