While problems mount for Dodgers’ owner Frank McCourt off the field, his team still has to play games on it. In fact, despite their owner’s bankruptcy filing on Monday, the boys in blue crushed the Twins 15-0 with an offensive attack that saw the Dodgers put runs on the board in seven different innings.
There’s a nice bit of symmetry between the Dodgers’ run total last night and the amount of money that McCourt is asking for in debtor in possession financing to make payroll for the rest of the season ($150 million), but perhaps the larger question here is how, exactly, this sort of off-field circus affects the players on the field. How can they perform when there’s so much at stake that doesn’t really involve them?
There’s actually a recent example of an MLB team playing through this sort of bankruptcy drama: last year’s AL Champion Texas Rangers. Maury Brown at Biz of Baseball compares the two situations, but for our purposes what’s important is that Tom Hicks nearly failed to make payroll in 2009 and the team declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2011 during the process of the same to Nolan Ryan’s ownership group. The Rangers pressed on, though, finishing second in 2009 and winning the AL in 2010.
Baseball has threatened to take control of the team if McCourt can’t make payroll, which is why the bankruptcy filing happened in the first place. They briefly took control of the Rangers last year between the bankruptcy filing and the finalization of the sale of the team in August, but the better-known (and longer-lasting) example of MLB stewarding a club is their ownership of the Montreal Expos, which lasted from after the 2001 season until partway through 2006, when the franchise — by then the Washington Nationals — were sold to Ted Lerner. Three times in the four seasons that the ExpoNats were a ward of the league, they finished .500 or better. They haven’t done that once since and 2011 is really the only season in which they’ve even threatened.
The Dodgers’ situation is a bit different from the other two, though. When the Rangers filed for bankruptcy last year and MLB took over, it was a short-term solution as the wheels were in motion to sell the team to Nolan Ryan and Chuck Greenberg. Baseball was so certain of the impending sale that it allowed GM Jon Daniels to trade for Cliff Lee before the ownership situation was fully resolved. And the league was kind of forced into owning the Expos after trying to contract them, then forced into improving the product to be able to sell them.
This Dodger situation is different; the league seems to wants McCourt out but he’s fighting it tooth and nail. Even if he were to give up, there’s no owner lined up and selling the team would likely take the better part of the year. None of this really affects the players directly (they’re going to keep getting paid no matter what), but the real reason that Rangers were able to contend through their off-field drama last year was that the light at the end of the tunnel allowed the baseball operations staff to behave like there was nothing wrong. It’s going to be much harder for the Dodgers’ to do that as long as McCourt refuses to end his fight, because there’s a huge amount of insecurity, especially financially for the club. So the Dodgers won 15-0 last night, but it seems pretty unlikely that it’s a sign of good things to come in the near future unless McCourt agrees to end his fight and let the team move on.
Also last night: Mike Leake and his relievers combined to shut out the Rays 5-0 and keep the Reds within four games of the Brewers, the Indians and Tigers both won to keep the AL Central a one-game race, and the Angels used a win over the Nationals to pull to .500 and within a game of the Rangers. All of last night’s abbreviated schedule here.
And tonight: Zack Greinke and his weird season stat line (ugly ERA, awesome FIP, great record) faces Freddy Garcia and the Yankees as the Brewers try to hold off the hording masses of the NL Central, the slumping Red Sox go to Philadelphia to face the Phillies in what some will undoubtedly call a World Series preview with Josh Beckett and Cliff Lee pitching, and the Indians and Diamondbacks continue their battle for the title of Surprise of the Year in Arizona with Josh Tomlin and Daniel Hudson on the mound. Full schedule here.
