What Maryland Stadium Authority executive director Michael Frenz told reporters last night may be true: Cutting the state's take of Orioles' home-plate advertising in half might be the best deal the state could get. The lease says the state gets 25 percent of all ballpark ad revenue. The state, subject to approval by the Board of Public Works, says it'll settle for 12.5 percent from the home-plate ads.

The team argues, ridiculously, that the ads fastened to the wall behind home plate are really TV ads, not ballpark ads. Therefore the Orioles don't have to share (as much) revenue from those video billboards. But the state has its hands tied: Such disputes must be settled by arbitration, not lawsuits. So perhaps the settlement was inevitable. What's disappointing is that, as the Daily Record reports, "the settlement does not cover the potential for the team to replace the physical ads with virtual ones added to game broadcasts by computer, an option that could leave the authority without any ability to collect a share of the revenue and one the team has repeatedly referenced in the dispute."

The potential for virtual home plate ads, of course, was the Orioles' primary leverage in achieving this concession. If the settlement indeed doesn't address this issue, it leaves the team free to apply that threat again, in the future.

Here is a September column on the dispute.