So after all is said and done, the sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers is held hostage by that greedy little carpetbagger Frank McCourt, who wants to have his cake and eat it too.
McCourt wants to sell the Dodgers while keeping ownership of the parking lot so he can torture Dodger fans by increasing parking fees on a captive audience.
In Los Angeles, McCourt will live in infamy along with such figures as Charles Manson and the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez.
Rarely have I seen a person buy a sports franchise and make a bigger mess of it except for Leonard Tose, who effectively lost the Philadelphia Eagles gambling in Atlantic City, and Ted Stepien who trashed the Cleveland Cavaliers in the early 1980s.
Even a casual sports fan can see the difficulties of a sports team not owning its own parking lot, particularly with a stadium as unique as Dodger Stadium. It is not unrealistic to imagine a greedy interloper like McCourt raising parking fees because he needs a bigger mansion while Dodger fans living on low incomes must underwrite his latest whim by paying exorbitant parking fees.
As Mitt Romney would say, “I am not worried about the poor.”
The new Dodger owners will be powerless to stop his actions left only to apologize to fans for parking increases. It is difficult to find a scenario where the new owner of the team, McCourt and the fans can live in harmony based upon McCourt’s history as the Dodger owner.
Any harmony would be immediately destroyed by McCourt’s desire to build a shopping center on the property which would further clog the limited entrances and exits to Chavez Ravine where the stadium is located. Chaos will ensue and only the fans will ultimately suffer.
There are already threats to boycott games that would only get worse if McCourt either raises parking prices or builds the shopping center he has so long desired. Where would that leave the new owner? In the middle of a strike by fans, the new owner would not have any power to solve the fans’ issues. A veritable death sentence for this baseball franchise.
As award-winning writer Bill Dwyre of the Los Angeles Times proffered, “Any McCourt development projects in his parking lots would be difficult, at best, because they would need the nod of city fathers, who need the nod of city voters, many of whom have long ago shaken their heads on anything to do with McCourt. Still, the thought of McCourt ending up with a piece of the Dodgers action, even though it is just a parking lot, is frightening.”
This problem is the fault of the Commissioner of Baseball who, after allowing McCourt to buy the franchise with a few nickels, permitted the parking lot to be separated from the team into two different legal entities.
A first-year law student would quickly recognize that this was an asset protection scheme that would permit McCourt to do exactly what he is doing today—bifurcating assets to paralyze any challenges to his ownership of the Dodgers.
Now it will take a bevy of lawyers to try and correct this flagrant error by the commissioner. The question, like the proverbial light bulb, is how many lawyers will it take to make McCourt do the right thing. But the real question is whether all the lawyers in the world can make McCourt do the right thing.
The right thing is for McCourt to sell all his interests in the Dodgers and Chavez Ravine and go back under the rock he came out from under. But that is not going to happen while McCourt is blinded by greed and offered easy pickings like those put on a platter by Bud Selig.
The sale is in phase two and already two approved buyers have withdrawn from the bidding process. McCourt wants $1.5 billion for a team that does not even own its own parking lot.
Either McCourt is a fool or he has played his cards better than Major League Baseball. Since the entity owning the parking lot is not in bankruptcy court, the judge may be powerless to change the course of this sale.
So what happens if no one is willing to pay $1.5 billion for a baseball team with nowhere for fans to park? What will the bankruptcy judge’s solution to this problem be? Does he have the authority to make rulings outside the assets before him?
And what happens when McCourt cannot meet the April 30, 2012 deadline to pay his former spouse from the proceeds of the Dodger sale? Those issues remain in a Los Angeles courtroom before the family law judge.
This is going to be an interesting phase of the Dodger sale. The commissioner is already huddling with a room full of lawyers trying to determine his next move. The next chess move in their complicated divorce/bankruptcy/sale of the McCourt Dodgers may end up in a higher court with the distinct possibility of making new law at the United States Supreme Court.
Whatever happens will be bad for Dodger fans and tarnish the City of L.A., which has bent over backwards to accommodate Dodger owners since 1957.
Stay tuned as Frank McCourt seeks to alienate every fan and citizen in the Greater Los Angeles Area. Something he already excels at.
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