6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog: Worst-Case Scenario Appearing In The McCourt Divorce

Proceeds from the ads below will be donated to the Bob Wuesthoff scholarship fund.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Worst-Case Scenario Appearing In The McCourt Divorce

Both sides think they're winning, and both sides think they can get a favorable settlement at this point. What that means:

As has been pointed out multiple times already, a settlement will result in Frank McCourt retaining the Dodgers. Sadly.
He can't pay for anything now, and no bank will give him a loan to satify Team Jamie. So what to do?
"They're going to have to give up some of their equity to a third party," Boies said.
However, Frank could keep the Dodgers all in his family and pay off Jamie by negotiating a front-loaded extension of the team's television contract with Fox.
"You may have figured out our deal," Susman said, smiling.
The bad news there is that, as Molly Knight pointed out in a recent tweet, the Dodgers would then be in thrall to Fox for even longer than the remaining three years on their deal, precluding the creation of a Dodgers-only TV network a la NESN (Red Sox) and YES (Yankees). This would mean negotiating in the worst possible market (a down economy) with a bad team (possibly the first losing Dodgers team since the losing 2005 team, and only the fourth losing team in the last two decades. Worst of all, the negotiating team on the other side of the table that knows Team Frank is talking under duress. This can only have bad repercussions for the sort of contract they can get.

My hope at this point is that Jamie is so pissed at Frank that she eventually holds out in hopes the judge will toss the MPA. However, it's possible that even if the case goes to Judge Gordon, he might not decide in her favor if he decides that intent is more important than the written contract. The upshot for any scenario where Frank retains ownership of the Dodgers is so horrible it's hard to know how best to quantify it. The Dodgers would become a joke, a team crippled by weak, selfish, and fiscally irresponsible ownership. Having flushed every young player from the farm for help (see the reckless late season trades Ned made this year for and disposing of Octavio Dotel for prime examples), with an aging and increasingly ineffective core, the Dodgers might be unwatchable for years.

Update: I posted at True Blue LA that the Dodgers might end up with an $80M payroll next year. This apparently is quite low, as Eric Stephen has already estimated that the team will have a baseline, including arbitration awards, of around $87M. But I wonder: with James Loney really not that good, Jonathan Broxton's meltdown, an injury-plagued season for Russell Martin (about whose future MSTI recently had a fine post) — well, is it really so unreasonable to assume one or more of these guys will be non-tendered, most likely Loney, and that payroll really will be closer to $80M than $100M?

Labels: dodgers, mccourts