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things looking more grim by the day. i know the fox news rights helped force this carpetbagger into the ownership role but now all signals pointing to a miserable end. too bad no one managed to find this guy prior to approval. dodger fans are phucked
They say those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
The Los Angeles Dodgers could be in for a really tough time, because it appears that neither Frank or Jamie McCourt, MLB, or the News Corp, who have loaned much of the money used to buy their own ball club, have learned any lessons from the past.
Recently, two top-ranking Dodger officials resigned from their posts, allegedly after reviewing the McCourt financial plan for the Dodgers, which, due to their massive debt load, leaves no room for error. In order to meet the financial needs of the club, everything must go perfectly according to plan. As we all know, in baseball, this is nearly impossible.
For me, this revelation is “déjà vu all over again.â€
I moved to Baltimore in 1988 as a manager for Opryland, USA, whose entertainment management arm had been engaged to run a new nightclub/restaurant venue just off Baltimore's Inner Harbor, to be called "Baltimore's Fishmarket" (the large building that housed the complex was once the city's public fish market). The owner of said project was none other than then boy-wonder parking lot and condo maven, one Frank McCourt from Boston.
As the Director of Operations for the facility, I attended a number of meetings with Frank, and his lovely wife Jamie, and found them to be earnest, but incompetent. Their ideas were useless, and we had to spend many hours explaining to them why such concepts as selling hot dogs and peanuts in the large concert venue, having the ticket takers working in character and costume (Babe Ruth, Edgar Allen Poe, etc.), buying $50 logo-embossed golf umbrellas for each VIP (2000 of them) for the grand opening in case of rain on Opening Night, etc, were just not practical or viable ideas.
Still, I assumed they were basically harmless, and they had hired a quality company like Opryland because they recognized that they couldn't do this themselves. No real harm done.
Imagine my surprise when we began to have delays because, among other things, the diner for the building was sitting on a flatcar in New Jersey because Frank didn't have the money to pay for it. Or that most of the custom signage for bathrooms, exits, etc, remained in a warehouse because the vendor insisted on payment prior to delivery. The $23M project could not even place the electronic signage for the main entrance into place, because the money wasn't available to get it delivered.
I was pulled aside one day by the controller, a personal friend who had originally called me in Ohio to tell me about the job. He was ashen. He told me he had just finished a meeting with the McCourts and their financial people, and that the project was doomed.
I asked how he could know that, when we hadn't even yet opened the doors (the delayed opening, which had finally been settled when we informed Frank that he could not open the facility without the diner, since the liquor laws were going to require the eatery for us to get our license, was still about a month away)...and he said "for us to make this work, everything's going to have to be perfect. We're going to have to turn a profit within six months, and we told Frank that this was not realistic; our people had projected it would take 12 to 18 months. This place has to be a cash cow right off the bat, because the debt load is huge. I'd never seen those numbers before, I'd only seen Opryland's numbers. I swear that if I had seen McCourt's, I'd have never called you to fly in here for that interview."
So, we opened the doors, and the place was packed all the time, overflowing, through November and December. But, of course, then winter came, and with it diminished numbers, within Opryland's expectations, but not what Frank needed.
Opryland turned over the bill paying to the McCourt organization in May, 1989, after six months of operation, per their agreement, and within two months, vendors were telling me they were not being paid. Finally, Opryland went to McCourt, and said if Frank would get a bank note guaranteeing return within two years, Opryland would foot all the operating losses for up to one million dollars for the next 12 months. (Opryland had a lot of management know-how, prestige, and money tied up in the project, including using it as a venue for the Nashville Network for filming shows like "Wolfman Jack's Rock N Roll Memories", etc. They did not want it to go down, and thought it was still possible to make the venue work with some trimming.)
McCourt was either unwilling or unable to do so, and so, in August 1989, Opryland called his bluff, and closed the doors. McCourt was never able to reopen the facility, he and Opryland sued each other, lots of Baltimore businesses lost a lot of money in unpaid bills (a personal friend who was my rep for our paper supply company told me they lost $45,000), and no other firm was able to move in and make it work (he tried to reopen the doors twice, but never managed to do so.) Frank finally "sold" the building back to the city of Baltimore for one dollar, after years of fruitless attempts to reopen. (It is now the city's Ch*ldren's museum.)
It's chilling to read that Dodger execs resigned because the McCourt/Dodger plan, as they see it, requires everything to follow a best case scenario, because of the massive debt load of McCourt's purchase.
It reminds me of the day 16 years ago an ashen-faced friend came to me to tell me how our own project was going to go under because of the financing of one Frank McCourt.
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Don't get too excited JizzFlo, the Yankees are going to go Cujo on the Fillies. 
well there is always next year for Dodgers to make the playoffs and lose again 
they are corrupt and crooked just like the fraudulent actions of our coward of the year noble peace prize for being worthless and actions unbecoming of a commander in chief of this great country 
