The great Vin Scully returns to call one more season before retiring, but many Dodgers fans won’t be able to see their own team in action

How TV rights have made the LA Dodgers the greatest team never seen

“It’s time for Dodger baseball.”



Vin Scully’s calling card is familiar to generations of Los Angeles Dodgers fans, a sign that the listener can look forward to three hours or so of the Hall of Fame announcer’s dulcet tones. His voice, a mainstay that predates the Dodgers’ 1958 move from Brooklyn, soothes nerves frayed by LA freeways.

Scully, now 88, will return this spring for one final season – his 67th with the team – before retiring. Too bad most Dodger fans are unlikely to hear him. A television dispute moving into its third year has kept the Dodgers’ games off most Los Angeles-area screens, and there is no sign the conflict will be resolved before the 2016 season starts in April.

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“Vinny doesn’t deserve this. The fans of LA don’t deserve this,” fellow Hall of Fame announcer Tim McCarver told the Guardian. “I’m befuddled by the whole thing.”

As with most disputes in professional sports, the Dodgers’ problems stem from money.

A 2013 deal between the team and Time Warner Cable guaranteed the Dodgers $8.35bn over 25 years. The pact founded a network, SportsNet LA, that would carry the team’s games.

But the hefty price tag led to a problem for non-Time Warner Cable customers: The company has required that other providers, such as DirecTV, pay a premium – more than $4 per subscriber – for the network. Most of those carriers have declined to pay, keeping the Dodgers off the air in the majority of homes.

Neither the team nor Time Warner have budged on the matter. The paralysis is likely to eat away at the fan base, says Daniel Durbin, a communications professor with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media and Society.

“I would just expect the resentment to build,” Durbin says. “It’s really poor public relations.”

The problem, he says, is the team’s owners. With ticket prices rising dramatically in recent years to pay, in part, for the highest payroll in baseball, it’s clear which fans the Dodgers’ owners are most interested in attracting, he said.

“When you pull fans from the 1%, it’s easy not to have the blue-collar fan at the front of your mind,” Durbin said. “I think it should be a warning to other big-market teams [to avoid massive television contracts].”

The Dodgers and DirecTV declined to comment for this article. A Time Warner spokesman said SportsNet LA is “available on fair terms consistent with its value”.

A quick glance at social media makes it clear Dodger fans already resent the delay. Many bemoan the fact that Los Angeles is getting a football team, the Rams, before a solution is found for the Dodgers mess. Others wonder whether, if they won the recent $1.5bn Powerball jackpot, they would be able to solve the problem.

Many in Southern California have resorted to VPNs, which can disguise a viewer’s location, to get around blackouts and stream games online, says Tim Knoch, a lifelong Dodgers fan who lives in Anaheim, just south of Los Angeles County. Knoch says he also led a protest march at Dodger Stadium before a game.

“I call it the greatest team never seen,” he said, noting his own anger over Scully’s absence from LA airwaves. “I mean, this guy is a national treasure. That $8.35bn is what’s most important, not the fans.”

Charter Communications last year agreed to purchase Time Warner, a deal that would expand Dodger coverage in Los Angeles, but the purchase has yet to be approved by federal regulators. And the deal would still leave satellite TV viewers out of luck.

LA-area members of Congress have asked the Federal Communications Commission to step in and mediate the dispute, but those requests have gone nowhere. An FCC spokeswoman declined to discuss the matter.

Brad Sherman, the Democratic congressman from Sherman Oaks, plans to renew his efforts to solve the matter before the 2016 season. Vin Scully is too important to Los Angeles to allow the dispute to continue, he says. Hearing Scully’s soothing play-by-play announcing “is important and it helps pull our community together,” Sherman told the Guardian. “We as a community are deprived of that cohesive force.”

Time Warner may have to accept the fact that other carriers are unwilling to compensate the company for the $8.35bn, he says. “If they overpaid, they overpaid.”