Charter's plan to buy Time Warner Cable will benefit some sports fans even if the government refuses to approve the merger. Just after announcing the proposed acquisition today, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said his company will finally begin showing Los Angeles Dodgers games in Southern California.

Dodgers games have been unavailable to most pay-TV subscribers in the region since the beginning of the 2014 season. That's because Time Warner Cable has exclusive rights to air Dodgers games locally on its new SportsNet LA regional network, and that company demanded that other TV providers like Charter, AT&T, and DirecTV pay more money for broadcast rights than the companies are willing to spend. Because the other TV providers refused to pay TWC for access, Dodgers games have been shown locally only on Time Warner Cable, which covers about 30 percent of the region.

That's about to change only for Charter customers. "We are going to get the Dodgers on," Rutledge told the Los Angeles Times today. "We want the Dodgers on every outlet and we are committed to making that happen." Charter has almost 300,000 customers in the region, and they will get Dodgers games within a few weeks, he said.

"The move does not guarantee that DirecTV, AT&T U-Verse, Cox Communications, Dish Network or Verizon will begin offering the channel," the Times noted.

Negotiations between Time Warner Cable and those companies have apparently not made any progress. Fans who purchase MLB's online streaming package also can't watch the games in the LA area because of local blackouts unless they use a VPN or some other method to mask their location.

Charter also plans to purchase Bright House Networks, which was already showing Dodgers games and has an affiliation with Time Warner Cable in which TWC negotiates carriage deals on its behalf.

Although Charter doesn't own any programmers, Time Warner Cable's ownership of SportsNet LA and other regional sports networks (RSNs) could receive government scrutiny when the Charter/TWC deal is reviewed. The post-merger company would have a larger territorial footprint and thus stand to gain more subscribers if the Dodgers dispute causes satellite customers to switch to cable. There's less ability to switch between two cable companies, because they generally don't compete against one another.

"The larger the local presence of the [TV provider] that owns the RSN, the more revenue they stand to gain if consumers switch," said a recent Capitol Forum report by Sally Hubbard, a former antitrust enforcer with the New York attorney general's office. "RSN subscription rates thus increase in DMAs [designated market areas] where the cable operator is clustered compared to DMAs where the RSNs are independent or the cable operator shares the region with a competing cable operator. TWC’s long-term deals with the Lakers, Dodgers and other LA teams and its RSNs in Texas and Wisconsin would likely draw significant attention in a deal with Charter, since it is already number two in those regions."