Dodgers for Sale

[Divinity]

Owner Frank McCourt reached an agreement with Major League Baseball on Tuesday night to sell the Los Angeles Dodgers, along with Dodger Stadium and the surrounding real estate, a decision that brings to end not only a six-month legal battle with baseball commissioner Bud Selig but also a 7?-year ownership that was simply never embraced by the team's fan base.

 

The Dodgers and Major League Baseball issued a joint news release in the wake of the agreement. It read as follows:

 

"The Los Angeles Dodgers and Major League Baseball announced that they have agreed today to a court-supervised process to sell the team and its attendant media rights in a manner designed to realize maximum value for the Dodgers and their owner, Frank McCourt. The Blackstone Group LP will manage the sale process"

 

The Dodgers have been in bankruptcy since last spring, shortly after Selig appointed a trustee to oversee the team's finances because of his belief that McCourt had been guilty of mismanagement.

 

McCourt purchased the Dodgers from NewsCorp in February 2004 for the price of $420 million, largely on borrowed funds. Based on various media reports, the team is expected to fetch somewhere between $800 million and $1.2 billion this time.

 

There was no immediate timetable for the sale of the team, but such things typically take several months to complete. It also wasn't immediately clear how this will affect the Dodgers' offseason player moves. General manager Ned Colletti said more than a month ago that McCourt already had given him a player-payroll budget for 2012 and seemed to hint that figure was higher than it had been for 2011, but the team being put up for sale could change that.

 

http://espn.go.com/losangeles/conversations/_/id/7180599/frank-mccourt-agrees-sell-los-angeles-dodgers

 

This is great news for Dodgers fans, especially if the team is purchased by Mark Cuban.

[VA Sox Fan]

Heard on the radio that Cuban thinks the $1billon "asking price" is too high. Sounds like he would have been interested if the price was more reasonable.

[wyo-sox]

I might be interested, I don't care what the price is so much, I just need to know what the monthly payments would be.

[Flynnatic10]

Christmas present, anyone?