NEW YORK — Nine Major League Baseball teams have terminated their deals with the FanDuel Sports Network to carry their local broadcasts, and Commissioner Rob Manfred said MLB is prepared to produce and distribute the telecasts.
Main Street Sports Group, which operates the FanDuel networks, did not make its December payment to the St. Louis Cardinals. It also carries games of Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Kansas City, the Angels, Miami, Milwaukee and Tampa Bay, along with 13 teams in the NBA and seven in the NHL.
The termination by the MLB teams was confirmed to The Associated Press by a person who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decisions had not been announced.
“No matter what happens, whether it’s Main Street, a third party or MLB media, fans are going to have the games,” Manfred said Thursday.
Teams that terminated their contracts could reach new deals with Main Street, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
MLB took over broadcasts for San Diego in May 2023 after Diamond Sports Group missed a payment to the Padres and added Arizona that July.
Colorado joined MLB’s distribution in 2024, and Cleveland and Minnesota in 2025. Seattle is being added this season and possibly Washington, which is leaving the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network.
Diamond was renamed Main Street Sports Group as it emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings last year and its networks were rebranded as FanDuel.
“Our focus, particularly given the point in the calendar, is to maximize the revenue that’s available to the clubs, whether that’s MLB Media or third party,” Manfred said. “The clubs have control over the timing. They can make a decision to move to MLB Media because of the contractual status now. I think that what’s happening right now clubs are evaluating their alternatives. Obviously they’ve made significant payroll commitments already and they’re evaluating the alternatives to find the best revenue source for the year and the best outlet in terms of providing quality broadcasts to their fans.”
Manfred said local media provides more than 20% of industry revenue.
MLB and the players’ association for 2024 allowed discretionary fund distributions of up to $15 million each to teams whose local media revenue had declined since 2022 or 2023, but they did not reach a similar agreement for 2025.
“We are not providing financial assistance right now,” Manfred said.
Manfred spoke at a news conference to announce an initiative that includes Foster Love and envisions 250,000 volunteer hours to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States. At the news conference, MLB staff assembled duffel bags with goods for foster care children.
ANAHEIM, Calif. — Reliever Kirby Yates finalized a $5-million, one-year deal with the Angels on Tuesday.
A 38-year-old right-hander, Yates flopped last season with the Dodgers. He did not pitch after Sept. 20 after straining his right hamstring, an injury that also sidelined him between May 17 and June 8.
Yates is technically making a return the Angels, who employed him for one major league appearance in 2017 after claiming him off waivers from the Yankees. Yates subsequently joined the San Diego Padres and enjoyed the longest sustained success of his career before bouncing to Atlanta, Texas and the Dodgers over the past three seasons.
The veteran is rejoining Mike Maddux, the pitching coach who oversaw Yates’ All-Star performance in 2024 while both were with the Rangers. Yates went 7-2 with a 1.17 ERA, an 0.83 WHIP and 85 strikeouts in 61 innings for Texas.
Yates still earned a World Series ring last season after agreeing to a $13-million, one-year deal with the Dodgers, but he spent three stints on the injured list and had a 5.23 ERA before failing to get on the postseason roster as part of the Dodgers’ struggling bullpen.
Yates is 30-24 with a 3.36 ERA, a 1.13 WHIP and 98 saves in 472 relief appearances over 11 major league seasons with Tampa Bay (2014-15), the Yankees (2016), the Angels, San Diego (2017-20), Atlanta (2022-23), Texas (2024) and the Dodgers. He led the major leagues with 41 saves in 2019.
He had Tommy John surgery twice, in 2006 while in college and after getting hurt during spring training in 2021 with Toronto.
He is the latest addition to the Angels’ overhauled pitching staff, joining new relievers Jordan Romano and Drew Pomeranz. The Angels also took low-cost fliers on Grayson Rodriguez and Alek Manoah, two once-promising starters whose careers were derailed in recent years.
AN ACTOR who appeared in Kung Fu Hustle has died at the age of 69.
Yuen Cheung-yan also choreographed martial arts scenes for Charlie’s Angels and The Matrix.
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Martial arts choreographer Yuen Cheung-yan has died at 69Credit: Jam PressHe died in hospital on New Year’s DayCredit: Jam Press
The star died in hospital on New Year’s Day
His cause of death was not disclosed.
Cheung-yan’s film career began in the late 1960s.
He was best known for playing the beggar in Stephen Chow’s 2004 film Kung Fu Hustle, having previously played a beggar in Gordon Chan’s 1992 King of Beggars.
The choreographer was a member of Hong Kong’s renowned Yuen family.
His late father, Yuen Siu-tien, was an actor and martial artist who starred alongside actors such as Jackie Chan.
Cheung-yan’s elder brother, Yuen Woo-ping, is a martial arts choreographer and director who has worked in Hong Kong and Hollywood.
Another brother, Yuen Shun-yi, is a martial artist, actor, and stuntman.
The siblings were all trained in martial arts from a young age by their father.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Cheung-yan worked in Hollywood, choreographing fight scenes for films including Charlie’s Angels, Daredevil, and The Matrix.
He was nominated four times for the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Action Choreography, winning in 1992 for Once Upon a Time in China.
He was also nominated at the 30th Golden Horse Awards for Tai Chi Master.
Despite declining health later in life, he remained active in the film industry and was photographed in 2025 working on Red Wedding Dress while using a wheelchair.
His funeral will be held in Hong Kong on February.
Anthony Rendon has agreed to restructure the final year of his $245-million, seven-year contract with the Angels, a person with knowledge of the decision told the Associated Press on Tuesday night.
The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the Angels hadn’t announced any developments with Rendon, who didn’t play last season following hip surgery.
The team and Rendon have amended the deal to restructure the remaining $38 million owed to the third baseman in 2026, presumably spreading the money over time.
Rendon is still on the roster and continuing to rehab at home in Houston, but his horrendous tenure with the Angels could be over.
Rendon’s massive free-agent contract has paid almost no dividends for the Angels. The former Washington Nationals standout has been injured for the majority of the past five seasons and has played just 257 games in an Angels uniform, batting .242 with 22 homers, 125 RBIs and a .717 OPS.
If Rendon doesn’t play in 2026, he will have appeared in only about a quarter of the Angels’ total games during his seven seasons with the team.
Rendon led the majors in RBIs, earned an All-Star selection and won a World Series ring in 2019 to cap an outstanding four-year stretch for Washington. After playing fairly well for the Angels during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, he was nowhere close to that player in the ensuing four years with the Angels, who haven’t made the playoffs or had a winning record during his tenure.
Rendon dealt with injuries to his groin, his left knee, his left hamstring, his left shin, his oblique muscles, his lower back, both wrists and both hips during the past five years.
Rendon also alienated Angels fans with public comments in which he appeared to say he doesn’t like baseball, although he attempted to clarify his connection to the game as a business relationship that isn’t as important as his family or his religion. Rendon had previously criticized the length of games and excitement level of baseball, saying he doesn’t watch the sport.
Luis Rengifo and Yoán Moncada largely played third base last season for the Angels. Both are currently free agents.
Rendon’s deal might top the long list of high-priced player acquisitions that have worked out terribly for the Angels during owner Arte Moreno’s tenure, including the signings of Gary Matthews Jr., Josh Hamilton and Zack Cozart and unsuccessful trades for Vernon Wells and Justin Upton.
Next year the Dodgers will try to become the first National League team to win three consecutive World Series. The Angels will try to end baseball’s longest postseason drought at 11 years, still without much of a plan beyond rushing first-round draft picks to the major leagues while treading the financial waters until Anthony Rendon’s contract runs out.
On Sunday they missed out on Japanese slugger Munetaka Murakami, who signed with the 102-loss Chicago White Sox. Of the Angels’ five acquisitions this winter, three did not play in the majors last season, and not because they are up-and-coming prospects.
If you’re an Angels fan and you’re sick and tired of this, should you reconsider your loyalty?
Jim Bowden believes you should.
Bowden, formerly the general manager of the Cincinnati Reds and Washington Nationals, serves as a baseball insider on several media platforms. On “Foul Territory” last week he suggested fans of small-market teams have an option that might be more constructive than getting angry.
In Pittsburgh, for instance, the owner would rather complain about the lack of a salary cap than spend enough money to build a winner around generational pitcher Paul Skenes.
“You don’t have to be a Pirate fan,” Bowden said. “You can retire as a Pirate fan, or trade yourself to the Dodgers.
“If you want to see your team win, right now the Dodgers have got the best chance to win a World Series again. As a fan, you can root for any team you want.
“You don’t have to root for the team in your home city. You can see the Dodgers play in your home city. They’ll come into Pittsburgh and beat you.
“If it bothers you that much, just become a Dodger fan. It’s fine.”
Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto celebrates with teammates, coaches and owners after the Dodgers’ World Series victory over the Toronto Blue Jays on Nov. 1.
On Sunday, Sports Business Journal reported that the parent company of FanDuel Sports Network is in jeopardy of shutting down if it cannot complete a sale to streaming service DAZN. The Angels would not disappear from your screens and streams, but it likely would mean the Angels would take a big cut in local broadcast revenue for a second consecutive year.
The Dodgers’ bandwagon shows no sign of slowing. The Dodgers set a franchise attendance record last season. They offer stadium tours in English, Spanish and Japanese. They launched a fan club in Japan.
So, as a frustrated Angels fan, you could hop on that bandwagon. Or you could try another large-market team — say, the New York Mets.
Mets owner Steve Cohen is worth $23 billion, according to Forbes. When Cohen bought the Mets in 2020, he said this: “If I don’t win a World Series in the next three to five years — I’d like to make it sooner — I would consider that slightly disappointing.”
The Mets still have not won a World Series since 1986. On Friday he took to social media to criticize “the usual idiots misinterpreting a Post article on Mets payroll.”
On Sunday, given the Mets’ losses of Díaz and beloved slugger Pete Alonso in free agency, New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro shot back, comparing Cohen to greatly unloved former owner Fred Wilpon in this adaptation of a Christmas carol: “Steve’s beginning to look a lot like Wilpon/Mets fans say ‘Hell, no!’/What’s the point in being so rich/And a ruthless sonofabitch/If you don’t spend dough?”
The concept of fan free agency — essentially what Bowden suggested — is not new. Every now and then some disgruntled fan will publicly disown his favorite team, then invite rival teams to suggest why he should support them. If you’re creative enough, rival teams will send you some free swag.
That level of desperation is what many Dodgers fans felt a decade and a half ago, when former owner Frank McCourt needed a loan to cover payroll, hired a Russian physicist who channeled positive energy toward the team and “diagnosed the disconnects” among baseball operations personnel, and disparaged as “un-American” the league’s refusal to approve a television contract that he said would have provided the revenue to keep the Dodgers out of bankruptcy court.
Fans wearing Shohei Ohtani Dodgers jerseys wait to enter Angel Stadium before a game between the Angels and Dodgers on Aug. 12.
(Luke Hales / Getty Images)
In 2011, the year McCourt took the team into bankruptcy, the Angels outdrew the Dodgers for the only time. The Dodgers fans did not bail on their team. They waited for better days.
That is where Angels fans are now — and, for that matter, where Pirates fans are too. Bowden’s suggestion that unhappy Pirates fans exhausted by the perennial futility try the Dodgers did not go over well in Pittsburgh. At the Pirates’ fan site Rum Bunter, Emma Lingan wrote: “Fandom isn’t a streaming subscription you cancel when the content gets bad.”
This year’s World Series was the best and most dramatic I ever covered. But the one that was the most fun was the 2002 World Series: the underdog Angels, the Disney team no one projected for a happy ending, rampaging through October and toppling giants. As The Times’ headline on the Game 7 victory put it: “Fantasyland!”
If you were there in 1982 and 1986, when the Angels had six chances to win one game to clinch their first World Series appearance — and lost all six — then you could have a greater appreciation of 2002. And, if you were there for McCourt bankruptcy, you can have a greater appreciation of Guggenheim majesty.
So get that Angels fan in your life an Angels cap. That fan will be able to wear that cap proudly one of these years, and all the tears will make the cap fit that much more snugly.
The family of pitcher Tyler Skaggs and the Angels reached a settlement Friday, ending a contentious trial as jurors had begun a third day of deliberations regarding Skaggs’ drug-related death on the road with the team. Terms of the agreement, which followed 31 days of testimony and four years of legal wrangling, were not immediately available.
Jury foreman Richard Chung said after the settlement was announced that the panel had agreed to award Skaggs’ family roughly $100 million when they were told to cease deliberations — $60 million to $80 million for economic damages, $5 million to $15 million for emotional distress damages and $10 million to $20 million for punitive damages.
Rusty Hardin, the Skaggs family’s lead attorney, told The Times that although he could not reveal the amount of the agreement, “the Skaggs family is extremely happy with the settlement.”
Early efforts to settle the case had been unsuccessful, with the Angels’ legal team and its insurance carriers rebuffing overtures from the lawyers representing Tyler Skaggs’ widow Carli Skaggs and parents Debbie Hetman and Darrell Skaggs. As recently as Tuesday evening, after the jury had begun deliberations, the lead attorneys from each side met but gained little traction toward a settlement.
The equation changed Wednesday when jurors asked the judge to read back testimony from experts on Skaggs’ future earnings had he lived. The request suggested that that the jury had determined the Angels were responsible for at least a percentage of economic damages. The jury also asked whether it was charged with determining the amount of punitive damages, adding to speculation that it might hand the Skaggs family an award beyond economic and emotional distress damage.
Roughly 95% of civil suits nationwide reach a settlement ahead of or during trial. Plaintiffs and defendants alike overwhelmingly prefer to eliminate the risk of an all-or-nothing jury verdict by agreeing on a compromise dollar figure.
Attorney Rusty Hardin, center, addresses the media Friday on behalf of the Skaggs family after a settlement was reached in their wrongful death lawsuit against the Angels.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Sources on the Skaggs family legal team said they were amenable to a settlement to eliminate the chance of the jury determining the Angels weren’t responsible for Skaggs’ death and denying any award. Also, while either side could have appealed a jury verdict, the settlement ended the case.
Carli Skaggs and Hetman hugged their lawyers and each other when Judge H. Shaina Colover announced that a settlement had been reached and jurors were excused.
“The Skaggs family has reached a confidential settlement with Angels Baseball that brings to a close a difficult six-year process, allowing our families to focus on healing,” the family said in a statement. “We are deeply grateful to the members of this jury, and to our legal team. Their engagement and focus gave us faith, and now we have finality.
“This trial exposed the truth and we hope Major League Baseball will now do its part in holding the Angels accountable. While nothing can bring Tyler back, we will continue to honor his memory.”
MLB declined to comment on the settlement.
A jury verdict favoring the Angels also would have meant the high-powered Skaggs legal team that has spent thousands of hours on the case wouldn’t have been paid. Their contingency fee — typically at least 40% of an award — would have been zero.
Skaggs died July 1, 2019, during an Angels road trip in Texas after snorting an illicit pain pill that was laced with fentanyl.
The pill was given to Skaggs by Angels communications director Eric Kay, who is serving 22 years in federal prison for his role in the pitcher’s death. Skaggs was discovered in his Southlake, Texas, hotel room the next morning, and an autopsy concluded he accidentally died of asphyxia after aspirating his own vomit.
“The death of Tyler Skaggs remains a tragedy, and this trial sheds light on the dangers of opioid use and the devastating effects it can have,” the Angels said Friday in a statement.
Each juror had to fill out a 26-question verdict form during deliberations. The first batch of questions focused on Kay, asking jurors whether the Angels were negligent in their supervision of him, whether the team knew he was distributing illicit pills and whether he was operating within the scope of his employment when he did so.
Carli Skaggs, Tyler Skaggs’ widow, with attorney Rusty Hardin in court Friday in Santa Ana.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
If jurors answered “yes” to any of those questions, they were then asked whether the Angels’ negligence and Kay’s “unfitness or incompetence” were substantial factors in the death of Skaggs, as well as harm to his iPad.
Consideration of the iPad, which Skaggs used as a surface to chop up drugs, was related solely to punitive damages.
The first damages the jury considered were economic. Experts for the Skaggs family lawyers testified that he would have made an estimated $102 million had he lived and continued to pitch. Experts for the Angels said his earnings wouldn’t have been more than $30 million.
During closing statements, Skaggs family attorney Daniel Dutko suggested that the Angels were 70 to 90 percent responsible for his death, and that Kay and Skaggs could each be assigned about 10 percent of the blame. Angels attorney Todd Theodora did not suggest a specific percentage, but conceded the jury might find Kay partially responsible for Skaggs’ death.
Also during closing statements, Dutko and Theodora each walked the jury through the nine-page verdict form, suggesting how questions should be answered based on testimony that supported their arguments. While criminal cases require a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, civil cases require only a preponderance of the evidence. At least nine of the 12 jurors are required to agree on a verdict.
Dutko said the Angels for years were negligent in dealing with Kay, a team employee since 1996 whose illicit opioid use became apparent as early as 2009, according to testimony. Evidence showed the Angels concealed Kay’s addiction rather than follow team and Major League Baseball policies in reporting it and punishing Kay, Dutko told the jury.
“Is that reasonable, is that how we want companies in our country to run?” Dutko said. “They didn’t monitor anything. They didn’t do anything.”
“There is no doubt that if Eric Kay wasn’t employed by the Angels, if he wasn’t in that clubhouse, Tyler Skaggs would be alive.”
Kay entered outpatient rehab for substance abuse in the spring of 2019 and returned to work just weeks before he was sent with the Angels to Texas. Skaggs quickly texted Kay asking for oxycodone pills. Theodora argued that the messages showed Skaggs was an uncontrollable addict who had little regard for Kay’s well-being.
Theodora showed the jury a pyramid-shaped graphic with Skaggs at the top and players who evidence had shown were given opioids by Skaggs under him, and argued that Skaggs was as complicit in distributing the drugs as Kay.
The Angels attorney told the jury that the plaintiffs’ stance that Kay should have been fired applied to Skaggs as well. “What you see here is a classic double standard,” Theodora said.
Dutko delivered a rebuttal to Theodora’s closing statement, returning to the theme that the Angels never took any responsibility for Skaggs’ death and told jurors that they can make that clear by reaching a verdict in favor of his wife and parents.
“The only reason Tyler Skaggs is dead is the Angels,” Dutko said. “We have fought for Tyler Skaggs and I will continue to fight for Tyler Skaggs as long as I’m alive. I need you to fight for him, please.”
The jury was close to a verdict that would have favored Skaggs’ family. Chung said the panel was discussing apportionment of responsibility and would have been done by the noon lunch break had they not been told to cease deliberations around 9:30 a.m.
He said his own determination was that the Angels bore 50% of the responsibility for Skaggs’ death while Kay was responsible for 35% and Skaggs for 15%.
“Ultimately, we felt the Angels needed to know that they were at fault,” Chung said. “Just to say, ‘Do better.’ They needed to do better.”
