Jamie McCourt wants more cash

She says Frank understated the team's value.

http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/2012/09/26/apnewsbreak-dodger-owner-back-divorce-court/QlSUo9ulmdKtHRtAkHNxbI/story.html

 

No, instead it was more like the Magic Johnson group that INSANELY overvalued the team, it wasn't known that was gonna happen at the time of the divorce agreement. Too bad for Jamie, but the number she agreed on was her choice, she can blame her lawyers if she thinks they underestimated Frank's worth.

The McCourts sit damn near the top of my "wish they'd go away forever" people list.

 

Hey, plastic surgery isn't cheap.

 

I don't think the purchasing group insanely overvalued the franchise -- the Dodgers franchise, run even half-competently, should be at the very worst the second most valuable franchise in American team sports.

The unmitigated fanbase-repelliing fuckups of the McCourt regime were the only reason this might momentarily have not been true. Presuming the new group is even barely competent they will be a huge improvement and the franchise value will zoom.

As far as the legal battle between fuckup McCourt and his shriveled-up golddigger cu_nt ex, fuck 'em both. The only good outcome of the proceedings would be if they could be both thrown in jail.

 

Instead ole Frank came out of it as a billionaire--one of the more glaring examples of utterly incompetent douchebaggery being rewarded you'll find--leaving the equally contemptible Jamie whining about being left with mere millions.

 

Hey, he single-handedly built that level of douchebaggery without any government help!

 

Well, in a very roundabout way the Dodgers did get plenty of government help -- part of the original deal which O'Malley struck to get him from Brooklyn to the West Coast involved the city of Los Angeles GIVING him (not selling, not leasing dirt cheap) several hundred acres of prime real estate around the Chavez Ravine location, real estate that at the time the deal was done (1957) was probably worth more than all the franchises in MLB put together.

Of course I don't know how much (if any) of that land the franchise still owns, but somewhere in the financial genealogy of the franchise, that golden egg was worth probably several hundred million dollars to somebody, and this was decades ago when nine-figure sums were like 11-figure sums today.

 

Ding ding

 

They are rich, educated, "successful" people who nonetheless can't be happy with their hundreds of millions.

Most people, possibly everyone, who dealt with Frank and Jamie disliked them. But even for those who saw it up close, what actually played out is still somehow disappointing, and still disgusting. To such, nothing is sacred except their own ego.

The whole exercise shows you the incredible upside of being a sports owner. You can be one of the worst in the history of a sport -- and perhaps in part BECAUSE you were so terrible, a group of responsible, respected people will overpay you perhaps all the more, simply to stop you from destroying a civic treasure. I just don't know too many gigs with more upside and less downside than owning a sports franchise in the TV era. The McCourts could've bulldozed Dodger Stadium and set fire to the hills and still made money.

 

This is what struck me when we had the thread awhile back about the worst owners in sports history--it's amazing how they nearly all end up coming out like bandits in the end. There's no financial punishment for their fuck ups.

Don't know any other business model where there's so little connection between how competently you run it and the business' value. Doesn't matter how grotesquely incompetently they run the business, how much they piss off their fan/customer base, how big of a douchebag they are--their franchises still always end up being worth immensely more than what they paid for them when it comes time to sell. Are there any other industries that compares in that sense?

 

The owners of the MLB, NBA, and NFL franchises are golden, its almost impossible to lose $$, its only a matter of HOW MUCH you will ultimately earn (but we can hope that the Maloofs lose their a**).

Now the NHL is different as there have been several owners I believe who screwed it up so much they actually lost money ultimately, Penguins B/K; Coyotes B/K; (and I think the Islanders with Wang lost right?)

 

To me, major league franchise values strike me as perhaps the next price "bubble" that has to soon burst. The "price always goes up up up" nature of it almost reminds me of what we heard about housing prices before 2006. It just defies all reason to me that these franchises can be multiplying in purchase value like this without a corresponding increase in attendance, TV ratings or overall popularity.

The price the Magic Johnson group paid for the Dodgers is just utterly insane to me. I mean, the McCourts literally drove the franchise to BANKRUPTCY, and then sell it for over 2 BILLION dollars, more than five times what they'd paid for it only a few years earlier. How the hell could a bankrupt business have quintupled in value in only about six or seven years? Defies all logic.