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Disney plans to buy the LA dodgers

Yes, Disney owned both the Anaheim Angels and the No-Longer Mighty Ducks of the NHL.
Their stewardship of both was largely seen as a failure. No idea why they would want to
jump back in with the Dodgers.
 
The Walt Disney Company is not buying the Dodgers. The family of the late Roy Disney (Walt's nephew) and their investment company Shamrock Holdings is in talks with other investors and is trying to buy the team. Shamrock Holdings is not controlled by The Mickey Mouse Outfit.

Others that are trying to buy the Dodgers are ex-owner Peter O'Malley and groups that include Joe Torre, Larry King, Magic Johnson, and Orel Herscheiser/Steve Garvey, among others.

Link: Yahoo
 
Disney owned both the Anaheim Angels and the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim under a much larger vision to turn Anaheim's resort district into a second version of Walt Disney World that never fully materialized. Anaheim Stadium and the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim (as they were called at the time), are separated from the Disneyland park by a few miles including the 5 freeway. The larger plan, at one point, was to build a second and third park, including a western US version of EPCOT and tie the three parks, the hotels, and the sports complexes together, all linked by a monorail. Several issues stopped this venture, and the plan never materialized fully. The parks still aren't linked by any kind of public transit other than the OCTA buses and the third park never came to fruition. California Adventure and Downtown Disney were built, and several intrafrastructure improvements were made to the freeways and surface streets leading to the parks instead.

As someone pointed out, though, Disney's stewardship of the teams was considered a failure, despite the fact that the Angels would win their first World Series under Disney's ownership.

Regardless, both movies based upon the respective teams, "Angels in the Outfield" and "the Mighty Ducks" were before the corporation owned either team. Disney bought the Angels years after the movie was in theatres, and "the Mighty Ducks" was a movie before the team was a franchise as well. Once Disney acquired the rights to bring an NHL franchise to Anaheim and the new arena, they named the team after the movie, in an effort to lure families.

If you read the above article, though, the group looking to buy the Dodgers is Roy Disney's heirs, which have no control over the Disney corporation.
 
The bigger issue at hand, beside the ownership issues, is the Dodgers' local television rights, which according to the Los Angeles Times in recent articles, could fetch at least $1 billion over several seasons. Currently, there's a legal provision in the team's current TV contract with Fox Sports (Net) that if the Dodgers were to leave Fox, they couldn't launch their own network with a competiting company (namely Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and ESPN). The Dodgers' TV rights with Fox and KCAL-TV expire after the 2013 season. Ironically, Time Warner Cable, who is a marketing partner with the Dodgers and has a Dodgers-on-demand channel on their area systems, is one of the potential buyers although they haven't officially put their name in the bids.

As some of you may already know, TWC is launching two regional sports networks here in Southern California (one each in English and Spanish) that will start-up beginning autumn of this year, featuring the Lakers and Major League Soccer's Galaxy as the centerpieces of programming. Based on the existing partnership between TWC and the Dodgers, I believe it's more of a natural fit that the Dodgers will end up with TWC.

On a side-note, but somewhat related, the Angels and Fox Sports recently signed a long-term broadcast deal last month, reportedly $3 billion over twenty years; it's very similar in dollars and years to what TWC and the Lakers signed almost a year ago in their broadcast agreement. Of course, the Angels used some of the new TV money to sign Albert Puljols to that mega-contract just weeks ago. With the Lakers and Galaxy departing Fox Sports West and Prime Ticket, and the Pac-12 Conference launching their own network next college football season (thus taking USC and UCLA sports with them), it only leaves the Clippers, Kings, Ducks, Angels, Chivas USA and smaller local college sports as their main broadcast properties. The Kings' contract is next up for negotation in a few years, as are the Clippers (whose ratings have vastly improved since the addition of Blake Griffin, and now Chris Paul)...Fox will probably pay a hefty price to keep them.
 
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