Brown: Reports Of Rangers' $3B TV Deal "Closer To Truth" Than $1.6B

Maury Brown has a good article up right now over at BP detailing why the Rangers aren't saddling themselves with quite the level of monetary risk that the combined amount of their successful bid + eventual contract would suggest, and talking about how the hire of Joe Januszewski from the Red Sox -- a hire made by now-deposed owner Chuck Greenberg -- now figures to be especially valuable to Texas, as Januszewski was part of Boston's initiative to create international sponsorships with Japanese companies at the time of the Daisuke Matsuzaka signing, and should be able to help the Rangers tap into significant new revenue streams that they've never had access to previously.

Which, of course, is all very well and good and deserving of our excitement ... but Brown also has this on the Rangers' much debated TV deal:

When it was reached shortly after Nolan Ryan and former owner Chuck Greenberg won the auction for the club, it was reported that the 20-year deal was worth $3 billion. And then, for some reason, that changed to between $1.5-$1.6 billion, which has now circulated about enough to become “fact.”

But, in speaking with two sources that were close to the negotiations on the television deal yesterday, they say that the original figure of $3 billion is closer to the truth… and possibly then some (the sources would not elaborate as to the total but said that based upon certain escalators in the deal, the package could be worth more).

So, as far as I can tell, we now have Brown in the group with Ben Rogers and Bob Nightengale that believes the Rangers' TV deal is actually closer to $3 billion over 20 years than $1.6 billion, and pretty much everyone else still occupying the $1.6 billion camp. The key here, though, is that Brown actually provides a key hint as far as the escalator-based construct of the deal -- and, in the process, sounds very credible, as that was a detail which no other writer had confirmed up to this point. 

If this actually is a $3 billion TV deal over 20 years (albeit one that doesn't kick in until 2015), then it becomes quite a bit easier to understand why the Rangers took the plunge that they did on Darvish. It also becomes quite a bit easier to envision Texas still springing for Prince Fielder, provided that ownership is at all comfortable with borrowing against those future revenue streams. 

This is turning out to be a pretty good 24 hours.