THERE has never been a shortage of examples to illustrate the old adage that life isn't fair. But few can compete with the tale of Frank McCourt, the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, now that he has agreed to sell the club for an eye-popping $2.15 billion. Mr McCourt is widely recognised as Major League Baseball's (MLB) worst owner in quite some time. A Boston-based car-park magnate, Mr McCourt borrowed heavily to buy the franchise from News Corp for $430m in 2004. He cut the team's player payroll while steadily raising ticket and concession prices; allegedly used the team's money for lavish personal expenses; hired his sons at high salaries for little work; had the club's charitable foundation investigated by the California attorney-general for improprieties; put the franchise in the middle of a vicious, public divorce battle; and in the end drove it into bankruptcy. Last April Bud Selig, MLB's commissioner, stripped Mr McCourt of his day-to-day control of the team, citing his “deep concerns for [its] finances and operations”.
The bankruptcy filing meant that long-suffering Dodgers fans would at last be free of Mr McCourt. But they could not get rid of him before he extracted one last perk from the club—or rather, some 2.15 billion of them, from a new ownership group of his own choosing (though all three final bidders had to be pre-approved by MLB). The purchase price is two and a half times the previous record for an MLB club, set by the Chicago Cubs in 2009, and over 50% greater than the $1.4 billion value Forbes magazine assigned to the team just last week. After paying off all his debts—including a $131m divorce settlement—Mr McCourt is expected to walk away with a gain of over $400m as a reward for his mismanagement.
According to Maury Brown, the editor of the Business of Sports Network website, there are three main arguments for the stunning sum. First, sports have become increasingly valuable to television stations, since they guarantee a live audience that will not record programmes and then skip through the advertisements. In December the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, the Dodgers' crosstown rivals, signed a 20-year television-rights deal worth $3 billion.
Second, Mr McCourt's disastrous ownership soured the city on the Dodgers, a Southern California icon and probably MLB's second-most-valuable brand, behind only the New York Yankees. In a wise effort to mend fences with the fan base, the winning bidders—whose cash came from Guggenheim Partners, a financial-services firm—recruited Earvin “Magic” Johnson, a former basketball superstar for the Los Angeles Lakers, to serve as the face of their group. No one knows how many people tuned the Dodgers out because of the bad press generated by Mr McCourt. But surely replacing him with Mr Johnson will encourage some alienated supporters to return to the ballpark.
