Posted on 06/20/2011 2:20:43 PM PDT by illiac
The settlement between Frank and Jamie McCourt announced Friday was contingent on Commissioner Bud Selig's approval of a new Dodgers TV contract. A provision in that proposed contract that would have funneled $173.5 million to the estranged couple immediately was apparently unacceptable to Selig, leaving the team's future in limbo.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, I bled Dodger Blue. So last year the hubby and I decided to fly down to LA to see my boys play the Yankees. I was shocked, Dodger Stadium is a run down rat’s nest. I.C.E. could have come in and deported half the crowd. The other half the gang squad could have arrested. The rudest people I’ve ever been in a crowd with, sat around us. It was down right scary. I’ve never been so glad the see the end of a ball game and the 110 freeway in all my life! I’ll never go back to that hell hole again.
McCourt is running a successful franchise as is. It could be better if he wasn't distracted by the divorce issues, but it's in a down cycle right now. He does have some star quality players there who need to be resigned or be lost to free agency. (Would a Selig takeover do anything but hurt the prospects of that?) In seven years, McCourt's teams have been in the playoffs four times. That's much better than the previous FOX ownership. There are many teams in Selig's domain who would kill to draw about 3 million people per year, which McCourt has done. According to business publications I've seen, the value of the franchise has gone from about $400 million when McCourt bought it in 2004 to about $800 million currently. That easily beats the rate of inflation.
Really, Selig doesn't give a darn about the Dodgers being competitive, just like he didn't even care that much about his own Brewers, and certainly let the Expos rot. So his history stinks. He's not interested in many other aspects nor traditions of the game either, just raking in every extra nickel he can find. I can give you numerous examples of things he's done that are just plain stupid. He is to "change" in baseball as Obama is to "change" in the country at large. Small wonder he's a big time Obama supporter and used his MLB web site to webcast Zero's inauguration ceremonies live.
Please see my post #37.
Problem with Dodger Stadium is the urban rot around it, just as it was with older, now defunct, stadiums all over the country. They still draw very well when they have decent teams.
The McCourts already burned through all the current revenue and were trying to burn through future revenue to pat themselves off.
Nothing about the deal was good for the Dodger’s team or any future owner if that deal went down IMO.
That's an interesting point, but keep in mind that the Brewers play in what is basically a AAA-level city. I may be wrong about this, but I believe Milwaukee is the smallest metro area in the U.S. with a Major League Baseball team. Even the most able, competent ownership in the world is going to have a hard time fielding a contending team there.
Really? So what? Selig moved them there himself, after he bought the one-year old Seattle Pilots for a song in 1970. If he wanted to field better teams, he might have surrounded himself with better people and plowed more money into the franchise. Yes, Selig is certainly no White Knight coming in to rescue anyone, let alone the Dodgers.
As for Milwaukee, the Braves were the envy of the National League in the 1950s after moving there from Boston. They won two straight pennants in 57 and 58, then lost a third straight in a playoff (to the Dodgers, BTW) in 59. And they led the NL (and I believe all of MLB) in attendance regularly! They were so successful, both on the field and off, that they inspired the Dodgers and Giants to move to the West Coast themselves because they felt they couldn't compete playing in dilapidated ballparks in Brooklyn and New York, respectively.
And if you subscribe to the theory (or maybe the excuse that Selig can use for himself) that the team from the bigger metro area beats the team from the smaller metro area, I've seen some outstanding teams in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis, for example, during the time that Selig owned the Brewers, although they were playing in the other league. On the flip side, the Cubs and White Sox, playing in the second or third largest city in the country, have basically produced a record somewhat similar to Selig's during the period Selig owned the Brewers.
Interesting that you call Milwaukee "basically a AAA-level city." That's what it was when Selig was growing up there (when their AAA team was also called the Brewers), so maybe what he did was incorporate a bush league mentality into the majors. Come to think about it, some of the charactreristics so irritating, especially to the older fan, about today's MLB, originated in the minors: The designated hitter rule, interleague play, and players changing uniforms all too frequently, for example.
Seems to me that McClown, based upon post #6 info (tcrlaf), is indeed a socio-political "criminal" of sorts engaging in behavior that will bankrupt our nation (undergirding the re-election of democrats).
Reinforcing abortion-on-demand is indeed "criminal" behavior which will be held accountable by God Himself.
I realized all along that both McCourts are 'Rats. But Selig is probably even a bigger 'Rat. Check out out Selig's political contributions if you don't believe me.
So the bottom line is this that this is an inter-'Rat spat between McCourt and Selig.
BTW, in case you haven't noticed, Selig has not allowed any Republicans into ownership of any MLB team since becoming commissar, and, to the best of my knowledge, there are none. (You're welcome to correct me on this if you have other info.) The last Republican owner of an MLB team was George W. Bush of the Texas Rangers. He got in before Selig became commissar, probably only because his father was POTUS at the time. Selig and friends are very much political animals, and lean left.
After the 1960 census Milwaukee was one of the ten or twelve largest cities in the U.S. It's no wonder they were considered a top National League city at the time. The Midwest was really a "frontier" major league baseball back then. When the Dodgers and Giants moved to the West Coast in 1958 they were the only big-league baseball teams west of St. Louis. That's pretty remarkable, when you think about it.
Your points about Cincinnati and Pittsburgh are valid (and St. Louis to a lesser extent, though that is not exactly a "small market" by any measure), but keep in mind that those cities have had long traditions of big-league sports that go back many decades. Cincinnati was one of the original National League franchises, Pittsburgh was one of the top ten cities in the U.S. until around 1950, and St. Louis was such a prime baseball that it once had two big-league teams (the Cardinals and Browns).
Sure there’s a lot of dollars in the contract. But a significant chunk of that money is going straight to the McCourts, which means it doesn’t help the team at all. Don’t you think it’s at all suspicious that McCourt says he has to have this money for the team to make payroll yet the team isn’t going to be seeing the money?
The Dodgers are one of the biggest franchises in American sports. Selig is a lot of things, but he’s not an idiot, he knows how bad it is for the image of baseball to be having this junk going on, and he knows how much worse it would be if McCourt got to run away with all the money when he sells the team, thus leaving the new owner with a long term TV contract they aren’t making a penny from. Ask yourself why the hell money for the McCourt’s divorce lawyers is even written into the TV contract in the first place. The simple fact is that McCourt is a crook, his conract is bad for the team.
The situation with the Giants involved co-owners Wellington Mara and his nephew Timothy. Wellington and his brother Jack each got a 50% stake in the team when their father re-organized the ownership structure back in the 1930s. Jack passed away in 1965, and his son Tim inherited his father's half of the team ownership. Wellington and Tim feuded constantly for the next 10-15 years, and since neither one of them had full control of the team the entire organization fell into the sh!tter. They couldn't even agree on simple decisions related to hiring coaches.
By the late 1970s, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle realized that the NFL's business interests would be in serious jeopardy if one of its oldest franchises in the nation's largest television market was in such disarray. He stepped in and basically forced his "surrogate" on the team as the Giants' first general manager, in the form of his close friend George Young. As commissioner, he threatened to force the sale of the team if the two feuding Maras did not accept this arrangement.
Young's first draft pick as GM in 1979 was quarterback Phil Simms. Lawrence Taylor was selected in the first round in 1981. The rest is history. They've won four NFC titles and three Super Bowls since then.
To this day, the team continues to operate with an autonomous GM that dates back to the arrangement that was forced upon them by Rozelle.
People seem to be forgetting that this is the real reason commissioners exist. They usually see them as the person that suspends players and negotiates the CBA, but the real job is to override owners that are making bad decisions that will harm the league. They suspend players because owners won’t, and occasionally they have to land on owners that being idiots.
The McCourts have basically turned robbing Peter to pay Paul into an art form, they’re business history is highly entertaining. Selig probably shouldn’t have approved the sale to them in the first place, but now that the divorce has made it all very obvious that McCourt finances are a house of cards that WILL fall he’s gotta step in, or be forced to sit there and watch as a dozen different companies use the courts to figure out which one of them owns the Dodgers because McCourt put the team up as collateral on a bunch of bad deals (don’t know if he has done that, but that is the kind of game he plays, including how he got the money together to buy the team in the first place).
And, BTW, your knowledge of geography and baseball history could stand a little improvement. When the Dodgers and Giants moved to the West Coast, Kansas City, not St. Louis, was the farthest west city in the major leagues. And no, Milwaukee was hardly a "frontier" in the 1950s, since it is only 90 miles or so from Chicago, which had had major league baseball since the beginning of the sport..
After the 1960 census Milwaukee was one of the ten or twelve largest cities in the U.S.
Just looked it up. It was 15th in population in 1960 with a population of roughly 735,000. Among NL cities, it ranked 5th of eight in population, trailing Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, and exceeding San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. I don't have the metro area figures on hand.
Rozelle later got his comeuppance in litigation from Al Davis, didn’t he?
Yeah, McCourt might be headed directly to bankruptcy court now, with Selig dragging him there like a dog on a leash! Selig is forcing him to fail!
Or else Emperor Selig will have his pants sued off him for denying McCourt the right to have his lucrative TV contract put into effect.
Since when is Selig a Dodger fan, anyhow? What he's trying to do is force McCourt out in order to give the Dodgers to people he likes a lot more than McCourt, and maybe pocket a little sales commission for himself in the process.
It’s got nothing to do with Selig. That’s how McCourt has always done business. He bought the team almost entirely on credit, and has spent all his time since then reshuffling the credit around, paying one creditor with money borrowed from another. There’s only one way a cycle like that ends, and it’ll be a giant pile of bad PR to have a team’s ownership determined in bankruptcy court.
This “lucrative” TV contract has DIVORCE LAWYERS as direct payees. It’s a bad contract from the league’s perspective and Selig is entirely in his rights and duties to decline it. There’s a reason these things have to be approved by the league, to prevent EXACTLY the crap McCourt is trying to pull.
Doesn’t matter who Selig is a fan of, as the commissioner of the MLB one of his jobs is controlling train-wreck owners that are damaging the value of their teams and thus the value of all teams.
If this were happening to an owner other than McCourt you might, maybe, have a point. But McCourt is a crook. There’s a reason he “has to” have this TV deal now to make payroll, because he’s a crook and all this divorce action has impeded his ability to constantly shuffle his debt around. McCourt is why league’s have commissioners, he’s a bad owner that’s abusing the system for his own gain at the detriment of the brand.
After the 2000 census, it doesn't even show up among the top 20 and I believe it had fallen to #25.
That's a very interesting table. Buffalo was the 8th-largest city in the U.S. in 1900, and was ranked among the top 20 as recently as 1960. And yet it's never had a big-league baseball team since the Bisons folded in the 1880s.
Regardless of whether St. Louis or Kansas City was the westernmost team before 1958, the point is that there was a whole lot of real estate in the western U.S. with no major league teams back then before 1958. No Houston (#7 among U.S. cities in 1960), no Dallas (#14), no Phoenix, no Minneapolis/St. Paul, no Seattle, no Denver, etc. In fact, there were no teams at all in the Mountain Time Zone when the Dodgers and Giants moved out to California.
It's worth noting that even to this day, Milwaukee only has two big-league sports teams (the Brewers and Bucks). It simply isn't much of a big-league sports city, in terms of either size or a long tradition (like Cincinnati has). In that respect it's very similar to Pittsburgh: a city in decline that struggles to hold onto its professional sports franchises as other cities become better markets.
And as to the value of the Dodgers' franchise (including real estate), it was approximately $400 million in 2004 when McCourt came in and is now $800 million according to business publications. So, perhaps even in spite of himself and his foibles, McCourt can claim that the value of his franchise has doubled during his seven-year tenure (discounting for inflation). There are a lot of owners out there who wish that their franchises had done as well since '04.
BTW, if McCourt really wanted to play mean, he could be forced to sell the Dodgers by Selig, but he can't be forced to sell his real estate, including Dodger Stadium. So he could, at least hypothetically, demand any rent he wanted from a new ownership. Imagine the possibilities in that scenario.
Al Davis was actually the AFL commissioner before the two leagues merged, and the merger agreement was made by the AFL's owners who negotiated with the NFL behind his back. The merger agreement was announced in the summer of 1966 -- about four months after Davis was named commissioner.
After he successfully sued the NFL to move the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1982, the team spent 13 years in L.A. before he moved them back to Oakland. At the time he also sued the NFL again -- for the league's alleged failure to support his efforts to build a new stadium in the Los Angeles area. He lost that one, then lost again on appeal before the California Supreme Court after the original decision was overturned.
Around the same time all this was going on, he filed another lawsuit against the NFL in an attempt to claim an exclusive right over the Los Angeles market . . . even though the Raiders were playing in Oakland. He lost that one, too.
Like him or not, Pete Rozelle was one of the titans of the National Football League in its growth over the years. Al Davis was just an @sshole owner who can't even field a competitive team anymore.
No McCourt is a crook. There’s a reason he’s under multiple IRS investigations. Decent evidence he siphoned over 100 million bucks from the team.
If McCourt followed your scenario it would be proof that Selig was right and you’re wrong.
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