Soup for your breakfast.

Good morning, and welcome to episode 429 of The Effectively Wild, the daily podcast

from baseball perspectives presented by the baseballreference.com sis.

I'm Ben Lindbergh, joined today by Zach Reel Avine, who is filling in for the Vacation

Sam Miller. Later in the show we will do listener emails as always but first we will talk to a guest

and our guest today is David Lazarus who is the consumer columnist for the Los Angeles Times

and KTLA TV Channel 5. Hi David. Hi thanks for having me. So we wanted to talk to you about an

article that you wrote last week. We've discussed and many people have discussed what seems to be

what could possibly be a broadcast bubble that is affecting Major League Baseball and individual

teams right now. National broadcast revenues are skyrocketing. Local broadcast revenues are

skyrocketing driven by the fact that live programming is very big in the DVR era. So we've been

wondering when this bubble will burst if ever and you made the case in an article for the Times

that we might be seeing the beginning of that bubble bursting with the Dodgers and that it's

possible that direct TV is sort of the pin pricking that bubble. So can you take everyone who

might not be familiar with the situation through it and you know what the what the conflict is

right now and what's at stake? Sure the question here is have we reached a tipping point in exactly

the issues you're citing and what's going on here is you know we've seen regional sports networks

for a long time now. It's pretty much business as usual in the cable and satellite business.

They cut these hefty deals with sports teams and then they pass along all those costs to the

cable and satellite subscribers whether they want these sports channels or not. All right now we

have the new management of the Dodgers really turning the screws on time Warner cable which paid

over $8 billion for a 25 year exclusive right to distribute a new Dodgers channel. Thus if you're

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