The Los Angeles Dodgers don’t open the 2014 season for 16 days, but the team’s owners have already been handed a huge loss, The Post has learned.
The team will have to fork over $1.9 billion in revenue-sharing payments to Major League Baseball over the 25-year term of its media rights deal with Time Warner Cable — 63 percent more than it had expected, according to the recently approved cable deal.
Guggenheim Partners led a group that paid a record $2.15 billion for the Dodgers in 2012.
Many thought they overpaid.
But when the global financial-services firm inked a cable-TV deal with TWC for a guaranteed $8 billion over 25 years, everyone from Wall Street to Waikiki then thought that Guggenheim and its partners got a bargain.
But the MLB revenue-sharing ruling takes a bit of the luster off the deal.
Guggenheim expected to pay $1.19 billion in revenue-sharing payments for the TWC deal over 25 years, according to published reports.
The $1.9 billion in payments spelled out in the deal — $41 million in 2014; $48 million in 2015; and 4 percent annual increases after — will leave the owners about $710 million lighter.
The Dodgers this year leap-frogged over the Yankees in total payroll at $220 million.
The Dodgers did not return calls, and MLB declined comment.