The city of Los Angeles is emphatically out of love. In fact it is aghast – appalled, disgusted – with one of its most revered institutions, the Dodgers baseball team.
The problem is not with the team's performance. True, the Dodgers are having a stinker of a season, but the city sees only extenuating circumstances as the cause. The real problem is with their out-of-town owner, an erstwhile car park magnate from Boston called Frank McCourt, who has managed in a few short years to run the team's finances into the ground while constructing a life of unabashed luxury for himself and his fractious family.It is not a sporting scandal so much as a financial one. Multimillion-dollar homes have been bought, refurbished and discarded, the proceeds of the deal which allowed McCourt to purchase the Dodgers; family members have been added to the payroll whether or not they work at the stadium; money and debt have been shuffled around a series of shell companies and subsidiaries, while the team – the beefy sportsmen whose job it is to thwack baseballs into the stands so that the fans keep buying tickets and beers and hot dogs – have been left almost entirely in the lurch.
Many of the story's more extraordinary details have spilled out since Frank and his wife Jamie, who served as the team's chief executive, filed for divorce a year-and-a-half ago and began to savage each other like bloodhounds in open court. Both appear to have regarded the Dodgers as the source of wildly extravagent spending. One senior team executive characterised Jamie's attitude in court as "Why have a family business, but to support the family lifestyle?"
If that sounds like a plotline from Arrested Development, the quirky TV comedy about a family of dysfunctional property developers from the LA suburbs, it is only one way in which reality is proving as strange as fiction.
Among the people found to have been on the Dodgers' payroll is a Russian-born psychic whose sole job was to watch games on his television in the Boston suburbs and send out positive vibes so that they would win more often. In years when the Dodgers made the end-of-season playoffs – which they did in 2008 and 2009 – he was promised a six-figure payoff.
The saga has come to a head in the past couple of months as it has become clear the Dodgers no longer have the cash to meet the monthly wages bill. McCourt has been scrounging around for his next short-term loan, and the overlords of Major League Baseball have concluded that enough is enough.
First, the league appointed a special commissioner to review the team's finances. Then it vetoed a 30-year broadcasting deal McCourt had negotiated with Rupert Murdoch's Fox network – in part because of misgivings about the terms of the deal, but mostly because the McCourts wanted to capitalise on the proposed advance payment and pocket well north of $100m for themselves.
Last week, in a high-risk gambit designed to avoid losing the team altogether, McCourt went to bankruptcy court, preferring to let a judge decide the Dodgers' future rather than waiting for the league to throw him out on his ear, which is what its commissioner was clearly itching to do.
The Dodgers are not the first American sports franchise to fall victim to venality, selfishness and staggeringly poor oversight – especially in this era of big money, marketing and licensing deals. Still, the scale of the McCourt-era debauchery is staggering.
"There are lots of subplots, but the real plot is that McCourt has denuded the team," one of the country's leading sports economists, Andrew Zimbalist, commented. "He has taken assets, he has broken them off, he has used the income from those to finance his extravagant lifestyle, and he now wants to use the income of some of those assets to pay off the divorce. It's too much for baseball."
It's too much, in particular, for Angelenos of a certain age who think of the Dodgers as an improbably gentlemanly organisation in a town of Babylonian fleshpots and entertainment industry debauchery. That ideal image is almost certainly too rosy – especially to anyone familiar with the sordid history of Dodger Stadium, which crudely supplanted a teeming Mexican working-class neighbourhood in the 1950s and early 1960s.
It is also true that for 30 years or so the Dodgers enjoyed a remarkable degree of continuity under the ownership of the O'Malley family, as well as a steady stream of clean-cut, well-spoken stars and regular success in winning trophies.
The decline came in two stages: first with the purchase of the team by Murdoch's News Corp in 1998. According to Fred Claire, the Dodgers' general manager, who was fired soon after the Murdoch takeover, the focus shifted almost immediately from baseball and the "public trust" he always believed the Dodgers represented, to Murdoch's ambitions to build a regional sports network around the team.
After six years, Fox Sports West was a fixture on the American broadcasting landscape and Murdoch was ready to offload the Dodgers. Surprisingly, there were few takers. McCourt looked at the time like the best of a very shabby field of contenders – even though he had previously sniffed around the Boston Red Sox and other teams and had been turned down because he didn't have the assets or the track record to pass the credibility test.
In retrospect, the financial deal that sealed the Dodgers sale seems little short of insane. McCourt borrowed $150m from Bank of America, $75m from Major League Baseball and $196m from Fox, some of which he later swapped for his car park business. In short, he did not put up a dime of his own money.
"It's been frequently reported that McCourt 'bought the Dodgers on a credit card'," a baseball blogger named Larry Behrendt wrote recently in what is generally regarded as the best financial analysis of the fiasco. "That's only half the story. The other half of the story, the more important half, is that McCourt bought the Dodgers on the Dodgers' credit card."
Essentially, McCourt spun off the most profitable team ventures – the stadium car park and the ticket office – into separate companies he claimed as his own. These companies then charged the team rent, skimmed much of the profit they generated away from the team coffers, and used the combined revenue as a basis for McCourt to borrow yet more money.
On top of that, Jamie McCourt pulled in a salary of $2m as chief executive, Frank McCourt claimed $5m a year, and their two children earned as much as $600,000 each, even though one was a student at Stanford University and the other was a full-time employee of Goldman Sachs.
They had a private jet, private drivers, an entourage of personal pamperers and four lavish houses – two in the Hollywood Hills and two in Malibu. Frank filed for divorce after accusing his wife of having an affair with her driver, which she denies. Frank has since moved into a Beverly Hills hotel suite.
The fans have responded largely with their feet. Although there has been no organised boycott, attendances have plummeted this season – but also partly because of an ugly incident on opening day when a San Francisco Giants fan was beaten to within an inch of his life in the Dodgers car park.
The team has no money to buy established players, so there isn't much to watch on the field anyway, other than a bunch of young kids frantically training to play at major league level and losing a lot more than they win.
"The fans are more emotional about it than the players," said Jon Weisman, a local baseball columnist who probably knows the fan culture as well as anyone. "The level of messiness is unbelievable."
And with everything tied up in the bankruptcy court for the foreseeable future, it is hard to predict when it will end.
"Until Frank no longer has money to pay lawyers," Weisman said sadly. "I'll never assume there isn't another twist coming."
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