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A former TV sports executive said today that the trustee who will be appointed by Major League Baseball to handle day-to-day operations of the financially strapped Los Angeles Dodgers would have to consider scrapping a TV rights offer from Fox Sports currently on the table and open the bidding to others. Former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson told Bloomberg that Fox’s current offer, which the Los Angeles Times reported today is a 20-year deal worth about $3 billion, might not be the team’s best option. “The trustee would take a very serious look at that deal and could very well void it,” he said. “He may very well think the team can get more money if they put it up for bid.” If so, that could open the door to Fox Sports rival Time Warner Cable, which recently locked up the Los Angeles Lakers’ TV rights with a 20-year deal that begins with the 2012-13 NBA season and will see the creation of a pair of HD channels to show the team’s games.
Any TV rights deal would be used to reduce the Dodgers’ debt, which Bloomberg Businessweek reported in August was about $525 million. (Forbes has said almost all the team’s profit was being eaten up by interest.) All of this comes two days after baseball commissioner Bud Selig said that the league would take financial control of the team, citing “deep concerns regarding the finances and operations.” On Thursday, Dodgers vice chairman Steve Soboroff ripped into the league’s decision, telling the LA Times that there’s a “predetermined campaign to blow [Dodgers owner Frank McCourt] out of town.” Of course, McCourt is at the center of the storm: His public and nasty divorce from wife Jamie McCourt has cost millions, and as part of the split a judge invalidated a prenup that essentially said Frank McCourt was the team’s sole owner. A $30 million personal loan from Fox that McCourt recently arranged to cover the team’s payroll raised the latest red flag at MLB headquarters.
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What is with Soboroff? How did this guy become so successful? In addition to McCourt, his other good pal is Donald Sterling, othereise known as the worst owner in all of professional sports. And then leaping to the defense fo these guys. What a tool.
I never in my wildest dreams would think that a Los Angeles sports team would have a worse owner than Georgia Frontiere/Rosenbloom/(add 6 other husbands). Well, this dream came true, sadly.
I’m just shocked that the McCourts haven’t requested to move the team to their real home town team: Boston.
@Micoos re: the McCourts requesting to move the team to Boston – We don’t want ‘em.
It’s kind of absurd at this point for a team like the Dodgers to not own their own network like YES or SNY.
Forget it, Frank. It’s Dodgertown.
Guess the Dodgers are bleeding more red than blue. The teams been a joke for a long time with most of peolpe in know in LA area. But at least they used to own or do they still own their own ballpark unlike almost everyother team dependant on a city to build them one. They gave up their spring traing facilities in Florida. Maybe Jack Nicholson can buy them and then they could have a real “Joker” running them.
This vaunted and beautiful sports franchise was picked apart by greedy, selfish people starting with Murdock who then sold them to the McCourts. Then to see McCourt go back to the Fox well to ask for a bailout was just too much even for the suits in MLB. It is a shame to see the team I grew up with, followed the greats–Koufax and his memorable teams, and the legends of the Boys of Summer suffering this way. Dreadful.
As much as I would like to blame The McCourts for what they have done/are doing to my team. I hold Bud Selig responsible. How this guy allowed the McCourts to even buy the team in the first place is what everyone should be asking.
Frank McCourt is clearly not in the FOB (Friends of Bud) club unlike the Mets Fred Wilson who has been shown a lot more forbearance even though the Wilpons used their Madoff accounts to finance team operations. And, the Dodgers will only be sold to another FOB.
The Wilpons used their money to finance the team operations. They made what turns out to be a bad business deal because the investment manager they worked with was nothing more than a fraud.
The McCourts used their team (do you really own something if you are leveraged close to 100% of the value?) to finance their lifestyle. They don’t have the type of capital necessary to manage the type of baseball operations necessary to run a historic franchise in the second largest media market in the country.
That’s the difference.
#BELIEVING PETER GUBER BECOMES THE OWNER OF THE DODGERS & MAKES THE FRANCHISE BETTER THAN EVER
They need to force the McCourts to sell this team and sell it back to the O’Malley family, who actually gave a damn about the team and the community as this McCourt guy is bleeding money anyway he can get a hold of it. How embarrassing is this? First, the Coyotes in the NHL which will move to Winnepeg soon enough, the Hornets in the NBA, who will move somewhere else and now the Dodgers. Selig is also responsible, I agree, for this mess. That divorce is killing McCourt bigtime.
LA doesn’t either anymore.
Mark my words:
There is a good chance that the number of teams in three of the “big four” pro sports (Major League Baseball, NHL, and NBA) will shrink over the next ten years.
Each of those three sports will likely lose between two and four teams.
The number of NFL teams should remain at 32 clubs, assuming that the loakcout ends soon enough for the 2011/12 season to proceed on-schedule. Otherwise, even one or two NFL teams could belly-up.
But the L.A,. Dodgers will survive. Someone will buy them (probably a major Hollywood type), and stablize the team’s finances.
Lets be positive and look at this as a beginning. Attanasio/Guber/Cuban all would be good changes. Rumor that Attanasios sidekick at Brewers might be trustee. Makes sense.
This story lays out the abject criminality of the carpet baggers that are the McCourt’s and their tacit partners in crime, Rupert Murdoch and Fox. The fact that Steve Soboroff, a sychophantic mouthpiece for McCourt characterized the deal as McCourt’s ATM machine shows how stupid he is. He let the cat out of the bag to everyone when Selig; no brain surgeon mind you and culpable for allowng McCourt to even get the team in the first place, started looking at the deal and seeing that the rights were never offered to other buyers.
He learned that the television deal Murdoch was striking actually predates McCourt’s ownership and is what brought McCourt to LA. When Fox owned the team, he realized he was going to be leaving millions on the table because MLB was going to consider it a conflict of interest for him to negotiate with himself for the televison rights. Consequently, those rights proved to be more valuable that just the billion dollar valuation that was the Dodgers, so he sold to a pawn; an overly leveraged pawn in McCourt who was already facing noose-tightening legal situations in Boston. Fox got him out of debt and they shook hands on the TV deal well before it was up for renegotiation.
McCourt, the bufoon he is, decided to f#@% his wife over in the divorce and in so attempting, he opened up the whole pandora’s box of legal documents that would expose this criminality. Everyone is to blame. The greedy Murdoch and Fox who think they are above the law because it’s empire building at all costs; the greedy and cliche ridden McCourt’s who consume like pigs at an ugly trough and Selig, whose conflict of interest is legendary and who made the choice to push Fox and McCourt under the bus rather than confront the uprising of the Busch and Steinbrenner and Henry and Angelo families who are his bread and butter and who said enough is enough.
This is ugly and painful for LA Dodger fans and arguably the most important franchise in all sports, It’s a sad moment in time for Baseball and the O’Malley family who must be riddled with sadness by this terrible turn of events. There’s a great expose for someone like Rick Reilly to do at some point. They should all go to jail!
“Joseph” doesn’t seem to follow what has transpired over the past years over the subject of sports “contraction. At one time, that was a hot topic.
However, union heads of the major leagues have let it be known that they will NOT agree to any loss of jobs whatsoever. The idea, apparently a trial balloon — vanished.
Even though the leagues are going through (NFL) and will be (NBA/MLB) going through new labor negotiations later on, I can assure that the elimination of teams will NOT be open for discussion.
However, the Los Angeles Clippers should be the first team to be thrown into the ash can, followed by its’ clueless owner.