On the latest Sporticast episode, hosts Scott Soshnick and Eben Novy-Williams discuss some of the biggest sports business stories of the week, including a settlement in the long-running media dispute between the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Orioles.
The two MLB teams on Monday announced that they’d resolved their legal battle, which dates to the creation of the Nationals back in the early 2000s. When the team moved from Montreal, the Orioles argued that Washington was inside the Orioles’ commercial footprint and that a second team so close could devalue Baltimore’s territorial broadcast rights. To settle those fears, MLB brokered a deal whereby the Orioles would control a significant majority stake in a single RSN that would hold the local rights for both teams. The set-up has grown increasingly hostile over time, and became an impassible roadblock when the Lerner family tried to sell the Nationals back in 2022.
Now that the Nationals will control their own media rights starting in 2026, could the team hit the market again? And given that the likely buyer is Ted Leonsis, whose D.C. sports empire includes an RSN of his own, does that make a deal more likely? The hosts talk about that, and more.
Next they discus the strange connection between the UFC and FBI. New FBI head Kash Patel reportedly told colleagues last week that he wanted the UFC to help train agents. UFC boss Dana White, a friend of Patel’s told Sportico afterwards that while Patel had previously mentioned the idea to him, there was nothing formal underway.
The hosts also talk about Alex Ovechkin’s NHL goals record chase. The Russian forward is currently 10 away from tying Wayne Gretzky’s record, and 11 away from becoming the league’s all-time leader in regular season goals. They hosts talk through some hypotheticals: 1) Would he break the record into an empty net? and 2) At what point do Gretzky, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and the league’s media partners begin the “Ovi Watch” in earnest?
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