But while the price is steep, the alternative might have been worse; the other bidder, Fox Sports, could have turned around and charged Time Warner Cable even more per subscriber.

“When a team sees their rights fees, and therefore the costs to consumers, rise more than sixfold, as is rumored, for the exact same games that they got last season, that’s an unsustainable model,” said Dan York, who oversees DirecTV’s decisions to carry and not carry networks. Yet Mr. York said DirecTV hopes to continue to carry the Dodgers in the years to come.

As both he and his counterparts at Time Warner Cable know, the games are popular with a segment of its customer base.

News Corporation, knowing the same thing, acquired a 49 percent stake in the Yankees-branded YES Network for nearly $2 billion two months ago. News Corporation is planning a national rival to ESPN, tentatively named Fox Sports 1, joining other competitors like Comcast, which has the one-year-old NBC Sports Network, and CBS, which has the CBS Sports Network. The National Football League has its own network, which clawed its way onto all the major distributors’ lineups despite costing nearly $1 per subscriber per month. An increasing number of college conferences have their own television homes, as well.

For the most part, all of these networks are requirements, not options for cable customers. (Some distributors charge extra for packages of sports channels for die-hard fans, but the big networks remain in the packages that most customers get.) Some games are hugely popular: On the high end of the ratings, NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” averaged 21.4 million viewers this season. But Dodgers games, like those of many local teams, were lucky to garner 100,000 viewers on any given day.

But analysts and industry critics say that if anything ever causes distributors to try more of an “à la carte” model of pricing, it’s sports programming.

“The cable industry has done everything it can to bundle programming and force consumers to buy things they don’t want,” said Gene Kimmelman, a former Justice Department antitrust lawyer. “Finally, one piece of their bundle has become so expensive that it may finally force the cable industry to shift gears and split the bundle out of fear of pricing its own customers out of the market.”