Perhaps the greatest bout of infighting among Major League Baseball owners this century appears to be over.
The league’s central office said Monday that the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals have settled their media-rights disputes, ending a drama that has been in court for a decade and ultimately reaches back 20 years to 2005, when the Nationals moved to Washington D.C.
As part of the settlement, the Nationals will remain on the Orioles-owned regional sports network MASN (Mid-Atlantic Sports Network) through this season, but will then receive full control over their TV rights for the first time since they arrived in Washington. The Nats “are free to explore alternatives for their television rights for the 2026 season and beyond,” read a statement from Major League Baseball’s central office Monday.
“We are excited to have this longstanding issue resolved and look forward to the season ahead,” Orioles owner David Rubenstein said in a statement.
The Nationals declined to comment. Financial terms of the arrangement were not released.
The Nats were for sale in recent years, although owner Mark Lerner last spring said his family had decided not to sell. If the family goes down that road again, the team’s exit from the MASN relationship should help. But the Nats’ TV rights are also not worth as much as they were in the past. By settling now, the teams and the league can avoid further fighting in public — in the view of potential broadcasting partners — over just how much the worth of those rights have fallen.
TV rights are a particularly sensitive topic for baseball owners. The worth of most clubs’ rights has dipped in recent years amid cord-cutting. However, Rob Manfred, the league’s commissioner, believes the value will increase if the league can reach new deals with streaming companies in coming years.
When the Nationals arrived in D.C. two decades ago from Montreal (where they were known as the Expos), the Orioles were the incumbent team in the region and objected to the sale, arguing that the Nats’ presence would harm them financially. To “protect the Orioles from any adverse effects caused by the relocation,” as MLB once described it, Nats games would be broadcast by the Orioles-owned TV network.
The Orioles’ stake in MASN was 90 percent at the outset, with 10 percent going to the Nationals. Over time, the Nats’ stake was to increase to a maximum of 33 percent by 2032. But the Orioles ultimately controlled the network, and the Nationals believed the rights fees MASN wanted to pay were not fair market value.
MLB tried to handle the matter internally through internal arbitration proceedings, which included a “Revenue Sharing Definitions Committee” made up of representatives from three different teams.
The RSDC in June 2014 found the rights were worth an average of $59.6 million. Commissioner Bud Selig, half a year from retirement at the time, reiterated to teams that he did not want the matter reaching the courts, threatening punishment under baseball’s constitution.
MASN and the Orioles nonetheless brought the matter to court. They took issue with a law firm MLB was using, Proskauer Rose, which was also advising the Nationals as well as the three teams on the RSDC: the Tampa Bay Rays, Pittsburgh Pirates, and New York Mets.
A second arbitration proceeding was held in 2018, this time without Proskauer and with three new teams on the RSDC: the Milwaukee Brewers, Seattle Mariners, and Toronto Blue Jays. A new commissioner, Manfred, was in place as well. A few months later, in 2019, the RSDC reached virtually the same conclusion: the rights for 2012-16 were worth an average of $59.4 million.
The court battle continued into 2023, when the Orioles and MASN agreed they owed the Nats about $100 million for 2012-16.
But the rights fees MASN owed the Nats for 2017-21 (valued by the RSDC at $70 million annually) and the fees for 2022-26 (valued at $64 million annually) have also gone to court, and more wrangling awaited without Monday’s news.
“As part of the settlement, all disputes related to past media rights between the Nationals, Orioles, and MASN have been resolved, and all litigation will be dismissed,” the league said in its news release.
The RSDC in 2023 and 2024 was composed of Mark Attanasio of the Brewers, Dick Monfort of the Colorado Rockies and Tom Werner of the Boston Red Sox, per court filings.
Both Baltimore and Washington are run by different people than they were when the dispute started. Rubenstein bought the team from the Angelos family last year. Ted Lerner, Mark’s father, died in 2023. The league itself owned the Nats when they moved from Montreal, selling to the Lerners in 2006.
(Photo: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
