Dolan, Mets play tag

Reports are out that CSC is angling to buy team

By JOHN DEMPSEY, RICHARD KATZ

The New York Mets have joined the New York Yankees as chess pieces on the Gotham gameboard controlled by Michael Eisner, Gerry Levin, Rupert Murdoch and Chuck Dolan.

Dolan's Long Island-based Cablevision Systems Corp., the sixth-largest cable operator in the U.S., would neither confirm nor deny a New York Daily News report that CSC is angling to buy the New York Mets for up to $600 million.

But such an offer "is the logical next step for Dolan," said Lee Berke, senior VP of marketing for the Marquee Group, a TV-sports company, and a former top executive for Madison Square Garden.

Berke and other sports experts say Dolan is reacting to last week's announcement that the New York Yankees are planning to merge with the New Jersey Nets pro-basketball team (Daily Variety, Feb. 26).

Dolan and George Steinbrenner, the principal owner of the Yankees, have held talks on and off over the last year or so, with Dolan wanting to buy the team outright. Steinbrenner, still unwilling to relinquish his power, appears willing to sell a majority interest only if he can maintain control.

Sources say Steinbrenner put out word of the proposed Yankees-Nets venture on Feb. 25 mainly as a shot across Dolan's bow to muscle Cablevision back to the bargaining table.

The report of Cablevision's interest in buying the Mets is Dolan's return shot, said Burke, a response to the possibility that the Yankees and Nets will walk away from their current separate deals for exclusive cable TV rights with MSG and Fox Sports NY, the regional cable networks owned by Dolan in partnership with Fox Liberty Sports. The Yankee deal with MSG expires following the 2000 season; the Nets contract finishes after 2001-02.

In 1986, Dolan paid $486 million for a 12-year TV contract with the Yankees, and the last thing Dolan wants is to get into a bidding war for renewal of the Yankee contract with:

• The Walt Disney-owned ESPN, which would love to create a rival regional-sports network in the N.Y. area, using the Yankees and Nets as the linchpin programming, supplemented with the thousands of hours of sports that ESPN has the rights to.

• Time Warner, which created its first regional network on Feb. 24, Turner South, a TBS spinoff that will feature games of three Atlanta-based professional teams owned by Turner -- the Braves, Hawks and Thrashers -- as well as movies and TV series. A new regional-sports network in N.Y. set in motion by Time Warner would get instant clearance on the 1.2-million households that subscribe to Time Warner Cable of New York City.

• An ad hoc regional created by Steinbrenner and the principal owners of the Nets, Raymond Chambers and Lewis Katz. Without a major media backer, however, this regional could have difficulty getting cleared not only by Time Warner Cable but by Cablevision Systems Corp., which controls 2.7 million subscribers in the Greater N.Y./New Jersey area, and by Comcast Corp., which reaches about 400,000 subscribers in the area.