Let’s get one thing straight, as the parties involved in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ unmitigated disaster of a local television deal invoke the unblemished name of an 88-year-old man in an effort to curry goodwill they themselves have spent more than two years flushing down the toilet: This is the consequence of greed, myopia and stubbornness, and no amount of pandering can placate the fans suffering because of it.

Not many people in Los Angeles are able to hear Vin Scully. (AP Photo) More

The Dodgers, Time Warner Cable, the commissioner of baseball and even the mayor of Los Angeles on Wednesday orchestrated a four-pronged attack to try and shame DirecTV and others into offering to their customers the network that broadcasts Dodgers games. They said it would be wrong if Dodgers fans didn’t get to watch the final season of legendary play-by-play man Vin Scully, ignoring that most of them missed the previous two seasons because the $8.3 billion Time Warner promised the Dodgers for 25 seasons of local rights meant excessive costs transferred to the consumer.

And that’s really the lesson in this Dodgers snafu, an unnaturally large microcosm of how the sports industry has transformed in the last quarter-century. The smartest executives saw the power of TV money, whether national for the NFL or local in baseball, and hoarded it like a prepper does gold. As teams celebrated their newfound bounty, those with cable and satellite subscriptions bore the brunt of the cost.

The system makes companies like Time Warner glorified middlemen. They shovel out beaucoup bucks to the teams, recover even more from the monthly fees for putting the channel on all their packages and end up with a nice profit for the risk they took in guaranteeing the teams their cash. At least that’s how it’s supposed to go.

Because Time Warner promised the Dodgers such an exorbitant sum, it wanted $4.90 per month from other providers for the right to broadcast SportsNet LA – an extra Abe that neither DirecTV nor any of their cable brethren were willing to charge their customers. So Dodgers games existed only for Time Warner customers, and the rest of the Los Angeles area was faced with a choice no company wants to foist on its consumers: get it illegally or don’t get it at all.

This is the consequence of sporting avarice, of teams valuing their TV rights above all and either ignoring or simply not understanding the changing landscape of content and how it was bound to turn this deal into a lemon. The Dodgers are still getting their money, and it’s enough that they’ve yet to shift their disappointment toward Time Warner for not fulfilling its end of the deal. Time Warner is taking a reported $100 million-a-year bath, which prompted it to cut the monthly asking price this week to a more reasonable $3.50 a month – a number at which DirecTV and others continue to balk.

Because the reality of content today is quite simple: You can get almost anything you want a la carte. And that is a powerful, emboldening truth bulldozing traditional cable companies’ business plans. Around 24 percent of Americans don’t have cable or satellite, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center study, and that includes 15 percent that are so-called cord cutters. The demographics on them, in particular, are frightening for baseball.

While those 83 percent of those 50 and older have cable or satellite and same goes for 73 percent ages 30 to 49, less than two-thirds of adults 18 to 29 have cable or satellite service, according to the Pew study. A large portion of the younger generation – the one baseball so desperately covets – is outright rejecting the model by which the sport distributes its most valuable product: day-after-day game coverage.

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