Posted on 10/25/2011 7:34:26 AM PDT by Beaten Valve
For the first time, Major League Baseball put a specific number on the amount it alleges Dodgers owner Frank McCourt took out of the team -- $189.16 million -- and described the distributions as "looting."
However, amid the legal and financial fine points of the Dodgers' bankruptcy, Bryan Stow could emerge as a pivotal face in the case at a critical hearing next week.
Stow won't be there, of course. But, with his representatives sitting on the official committee of creditors, attorneys for the Dodgers and the league are expected to cite Stow in their arguments in a Delaware courtroom.
Both sides cited Stow on Monday, a day that featured a flurry of court filings from several parties in the case.
The United States trustee agreed to appoint two fans to the creditors' committee, so that the interests of season-ticket holders could be represented through that committee rather than through the formation of another.
The creditors' committee and Fox Sports each asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross to deny the Dodgers' bid to auction their television rights, the key to McCourt's strategy to emerge from bankruptcy as the team's owner. The Dodgers asked Gross to extend their exclusive window to propose a restructuring plan until April 25, citing the refusal of MLB and Fox to work cooperatively with McCourt.
Commissioner Bud Selig has alleged mismanagement in wanting to oust McCourt. The Dodgers' owner has charged Selig with acting in bad faith, in part by choking off his money supply and precipitating the bankruptcy filing.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
I have heard that McCourt split the Dodgers team, Dodger Stadium, and the Dodger Stadium parking lots into separate business entities. In doing this, even if he loses the Dodgers franchise ownership, he still has controlling interests in the corporations which now own Dodger Stadium and the parking lots.
It’s a mess, financial and otherwise. But if he really still will control Dodger Stadium and parking lots, he will still be able to make money off the Dodgers.
You wonder about the “looting” of the franchise idea too. I heard that the Pittsburgh Pirates have been profitable due to baseball revenue sharing, and that the Pirates owners have put a sorry team on the field because it’s cheaper than paying big stars who could improve the Pirates team on the field.
“saving money” on security was unethical.
If the league is successful in this, there will be no more owner franchises.
It will be like McDonalds owning all the stores.
It depends on the details of the accusations. A McDonald's franchise can't just put up disco balls and declare Friday evenings McKaraoke Night with cocktails. I'm sure MLB has some pretty strong language protecting the league from rogue ownership actions.
If you OWN something, how can you be accused of looting it? It was yours to begin with.
If MLB realizes that it has senior position to the owner in one instance, it will become attractive to look for other owners to exploit.
What is to be feared by bankruptcy? the team will just get a new ownership which is not the league. That was the major flaw in the GM takeover. The bond holders, actually owners, were stripped of their value in the company and it handed over to the govt. and unions.
It’s not much of a stretch for MLB to do the same thing.
I presume MLB defines a franchise as a more than just the team on the field. In the Dodgers case, I believe the actual stadium is franchise-owned and could be included in any franchise agreements with MLB. I believe the accusations against McCourt involve these types of issues. I doubt the franchise agreement would allow McCourt to sell or manage Dodger stadium as a non-owner. Similarly, McCourt can't just create a new corporation for Dodger Dogs and sell it or keep it separate from the franchise.
I do not know the details, and I realize I am making assumptions. Just trying to point out that MLB could have very valid (and non-threatening to other owners) reasons for pursuing this.
This Angels' fan was delighted when we traded Brandon Wood to the Pirates..they don't come much "sorrier" then him..LOL.
Most parking tickets are worded so as to indemnify the owners against loss or injury.
Any legal eagles here have an opinion?
It's just part of the litigation game played across the United States regularly. I don't know about any specific wording on the parking tickets, but clearly, when you have crowds of thousands of people - a good number of whom who have been drinking - congregating in a confined urban area, crime can occur no matter how many police are on duty. The Dodgers and McCourt are a convenient suit target because of their deep pockets.
Naturally, Commissar Selig and company, playing every card they possibly could in their relentless vendetta against Frank McCourt (actually, motivated by Selig's desire to please ex-wife Jamie and her Democratic frieds in the Obama Administration and in Congress), brought up the Stow incident in bankruptcy court in an effort to show that McCourt doesn't care about the safety of his patrons.
Notice that after Jamie "settled" for $130 million and a bunch of luxury properties in the divorce case, Selig and company moderated their no-holds-barred approach against Frank McCourt and announced a settlement today.
Correct. That might be Commissar Selig's ultimate goal as he seeks to continue to consolidate arbitrary power under his thumb. He is, a after all, a staunch left Democrat, so he believes in a top-down distribution of power in the baseball world, just as he would in the broader society.
As you might know, Selig reached a compromise settlement with Frank McCourt earlier today. McCourt agreed to sell the team, but under circumstances where he is not totally under Selig's gun. So McCourt theoretically will be selling voluntarily and will be getting full market value for his property.
Yes, that's probably pretty much correct. It just goes to show how socialist concepts like "revenue sharing" have a counterproductive effect everywhere they are used, expecially in a "society" consisting exclusively of very wealthy entities, as MLB is.
BTW, the Pirates, are owned by the McClatchy family, the publishers of a slew of left-leaning newspapers, which seems quite fitting to these circumstances.
The teams that give up the revenue, the teams that receive it, and the amounts involved in this "revenue sharing" seem to be determined by Commissar Selig himself. Just another example of Selig's tyrannical rule.
Actually, there is a specific definition of which teams pay luxury tax and which teams receive revenue sharing. Selig admihisters the program, he does not determine the payers or the the receivers.
And, yes, there are teams like the Pirates (and their owners, the McClatchys) -- who have pocketed the revenue sharing check.
There are other teams, though, like the Milwaukee Brewers, who used their revenue sharing checks to sign high draft picks and re-sign their major league players. The difference is in the owners: Mark Attanasio wants to win, the McClatchys don't care if they lose.
But of course, Selig won't come down on the McClatchys and proclaim publicly that they don't operate their franchise in the best interests of their fans or the best interests of baseball, and attempt to seize the Pirates from them.
Yet McCourt, who can't be accused of not caring about his team's success, got nothing but no-holds-barred contempt from Selig and his ex-Steinbrenner lawyers - until yesterday. Is there a double standard there?
I heard that the Pittsburgh Pirates have been profitable due to baseball revenue sharing, and that the Pirates owners have put a sorry team on the field because it's cheaper than paying big stars who could improve the Pirates team on the field.*chuckle* The Pirates are far from the only ones who'd been guilty of that crime. A few years ago, the hoopla was over Carl Polhad of the Twins doing likewise with all those yummy Yankee tax dollars he was getting. (And anyone who thinks revenue sharing isn't at least two thirds a tax on the Yankees is full of it.) As a matter of fact, before his untimely death Doug Pappas of the SABR did a deep analysis of all the revenue sharing dollars and discovered several so-called small market teams "dependent" on revenue sharing, pleading they couldn't invest competitively in their teams without it, were investing in anything but their teams while still having resources enough to have invested in their major league rosters and their minor league systems without the revenue sharing dollars.Yes, that's probably pretty much correct. It just goes to show how socialist concepts like "revenue sharing" have a counterproductive effect everywhere they are used, expecially in a "society" consisting exclusively of very wealthy entities, as MLB is.
The teams that give up the revenue, the teams that receive it, and the amounts involved in this "revenue sharing" seem to be determined by Commissar Selig himself. Just another example of Selig's tyrannical rule.I'm no big fan of Frank McCourt, who seems to have used his club as his personal ATM machine---the IRS was talking in the neighbourhood of about $150-180 million even before the Selig regime bandied the same number about---and whose financial holes may have hamstrung the Dodgers just enough to keep them, when they were competitive during his regime, from getting much beyond the first or second round.
But the sooner Selig is gone, the way better for baseball. And it only begins with him having been stupid enough to sanction McCourt's badly-leveraged buy of the Dodgers in the first place. If not for the gravity of the thing, it would have been to laugh watching Selig go nutshit over McCourt's incompetence considering he'd sanctioned the idiot buying the team with what amounted to a house of cards in the first place. That's Selig for you. He doesn't wake up or wise up until something blows up in his face and damages the game.
But I'd go even farther. If it were up to me,
* No former owner, player, manager, umpire, or any team official would be eligible to become baseball's commissioner. Ever. Whatever his mistakes, and God knows he made them, Fay Vincent was baseball's last legitimate commissioner. It's time for the game to have a legitimate commissioner again. (Since Bob Costas doesn't want the gig, I'm open to suggestions. Maybe Roger Angell could be talked into the job; once upon a time I'd have thought about Bill James, but since he's been a Red Sox official that rules him out, too . . . )
* The so-called "small" or "medium" market clubs would be told, plain and true, to quit bellyaching, stop blaming the Yankees for all evil known to mankind (I'm no Yankee fan but even I think that crap goes too far too often---example: when the Yankees made a cross sponsorship deal with Manchester United, everyone else screamed such blue murder it didn't cross their minds that the Yankees only did what they wished they'd thought of first for another revenue stream) and living off some of the Yankees' well-earned revenue, invest their otherwise little-discussed and little-admitted resources in their teams (it would probably shock people to know just how well-resourced a lot of so-called "weak" franchises' owners might happen to be), and learn that brains wins more than money ever did (if all you needed was money, this year's Red Sox wouldn't have taken such a spectacular dive and any year's Mets would be a National League powerhouse, to name just two); or, get the hell out and sell to people who know how to operate a baseball franchise. Or was I just imagining that the so-called big money teams who got to the postseason (the Empire Emeritus, the Phillies) got shoved aside early and often this year?
* Don't even think about adding postseason rounds. It's been diluted quite enough. But start thinking good and strong about restoring the World Series' primacy once and for all. You want to keep up the good work that was done, when all was said and done, by this year's World Series? Easy: 1) Eliminate the wild card. (Let's see who really has the mettle to close ranks and hunker down down the stretch when you're playing for either division championship or bustaroonie. I'd have laid bets that, in that circumstance, the St. Louis Cardinals, who really came alive after August, just might have found enough to meet and maybe even overtake the Brewers in the NL Central.) 2) The division winner with the best regular-season record gets a round-one bye. 3) The remaining two division winners play a best-of-three division series. 4) That winner meets the bye team in a best-of-five League Championship Series. 5) The World Series stays a best of seven. 6) Just watch the caliber of competition ramp up and just watch the nail-driving pennant race return even more in earnest.
Situation update: There’s word out of Los Angeles that former owner Peter O’Malley is interested in putting a group together to buy the Dodgers and enable him to return to operating the team. (O’Malley was forced to sell in the 1990s when he couldn’t get approval to build an NFL facility on land the Dodgers owned, which might have meant getting the Dodgers and the O’Malleys over a financial hump at the time.)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.