The Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, majority owned by Major League Baseball’s Baltimore Orioles, will place about $99.2m (€90m) in escrow, pending its appeal of a decision against the network in its long-running media-rights battle with the Washington Nationals.

The Nationals, this year’s World Series champions, in August won a decisive victory in the eight-year battle against MASN in the Orioles, with a New York Supreme Court judge ruling the club is due that money in addition to the nearly $200m in rights fees it has already received for the 2012-16 seasons.

MASN, however, is now appealing that ruling to New York’s Appellate Division, First Department. And in the meantime, the network is placing the $99.2m in private escrow. The Nationals had argued the money should be held by the court itself while the latest appeal proceeds. But MASN and the Orioles countered such a move would require more than $2m in addition fees to the City of New York and not earn any interest while it is held.

Justice Joel Cohen, who ruled for the Nationals in August, on November 25 agreed to a stay in enforcement of his judgment that MASN sought, as well as permitted the private escrow arrangement.

MASN, created amid the late 2004 relocation of the Montreal Expos to Washington to become the Washington, has for years been one of baseball’s more thorny issues. The Orioles retain a majority ownership in the regional sports network. But it for many years has been unable to agree with the Nationals on the proper annual rights fees, continually bouncing in and out of court as well as internal MLB arbitration.

And while the state Supreme Court ruling over the summer clearly favored the Nationals, it still left unresolved how to divide up network profits for the five years in question. MASN has argued that with the additional rights fees coming due, the RSN’s profit statements must be entirely revised. That profits matter is now heading to the American Arbitration Association, providing a neutral party forum MASN has long desired as opposed to the league’s arbitration.

MASN, meanwhile, has filed an exhibit with the court documenting how cord-cutting is impacting the RSN. The network’s subscriber count has steadily fallen from 5.91 million in-market and 3.32 million out-of-market in late 2011 to 4.68 million in-market and 2.06 out-of-market at the end of last year. MASN has lost at least 4 per cent of its in-market subscribers each of the last four years, and at least 10 per cent of its out-of-market subscribers each of the last two years.

“MASN is trying to survive in the face of a paradigm shift in the cable television industry,” the network said last week in an argument to stay the August judgment.