The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse Read Online Free PDF Page B

Dodger Stadium’s massive parking lot lacked sufficient lighting. Off-duty police officers in uniform cost fifty dollars anhour, while undercover cops in polo shirts ran about half that. In 2009, the Dodgers started relying on the less expensive option. Their head of security resigned in protest.
    As Stow clung to life and the hunt for his assailants intensified, the drumbeat for McCourt’s ouster grew louder. Major League Baseball seized the opportunity to pounce. While Selig didn’t exercise his power to toss McCourt out right then, by the end of the month he appointed an outside monitor to oversee all of the Dodgers’ monetary expenditures. It proved to be a fatal blow to his ownership. McCourt protested, even going so far as to call the commissioner un-American. It also became evident how leveraged the team was—McCourt had been forced to take out a multimillion-dollar loan against future season ticket sales and charge the Dodgers $14 million a year to rent their own stadium. McCourt also raised eyebrows when it was revealed that the Dodgers Dream Foundation, a charity established to build ball fields for children in underserved areas of Los Angeles, had paid its top executive and main McCourt henchman, Howard Sunkin, more than $400,000 of its $1.6 million budget one year.
    With the team’s cash reserves dwindling, McCourt turned to Fox to try to extend the club’s television deal in return for cash up front to float him. The Dodgers were earning about $40 million a year for their TV rights when Selig sent in the monitor. But when it expired in two years, McCourt was free to entertain offers from multiple networks and select the highest bidder. The Dodgers’ next TV contract figured to bring in more than five times what the current deal was worth—maybe more. McCourt’s desperation to hold on to the club was understandable: a mountain of cash lay just around the bend.
    So McCourt had an idea. Why not borrow money from Fox against that future TV deal? Fox was more than willing to take the rights to broadcast Dodger games off the market to avoid a bidding war later, and the two sides agreed in principle to a twenty-year television deal worth $3 billion that would begin in 2014. Under the terms of the agreement, McCourt would receive $385 million up front. Of that money,$200 million would go into the team, while the rest would go to the McCourts and their divorce attorneys. Major League Baseball balked. With its monitor in place overseeing all financial transactions, there was no way it was going to let Fox toss McCourt a lifeline. Later that year, the league would allege in court filings that McCourt took $189.16 million out of the team for his own personal use, an activity Selig described as “looting.” Without that loan from Fox, rumors swirled that McCourt would not have enough cash to pay his players when checks were to be handed out that Friday. MLB didn’t care.It rejected Fox’s loan to smoke him out. McCourt had one card left to play, and he didn’t hesitate. On the morning of Monday, June 27, 2011, he plunged the Los Angeles Dodgers into bankruptcy.
    That afternoon, televisions in the Dodgers’ clubhouse played the grim news on a loop.Players called their agents to make sure their checks wouldn’t bounce.
    Though it ensured the end of his run as owner, filing for bankruptcy protection wound up being a brilliant move for McCourt. When an MLB team is sold, the commissioner’s office is involved in vetting and choosing the new owner. Because the league operates somewhat like an old boys’ fraternity,the winning bid isn’t always the highest one. The league covets candidates it believes will toe the line, a sentiment that intensified after McCourt thumbed his nose at Selig at every turn. But since McCourt owed hundreds of millions of dollars to creditors—and the Internal Revenue Service wanted its cut—the authority of the bankruptcy court trumped MLB’s typical selection process by ruling that