Bud Selig rejects deal between Dodgers and Fox Sports

 

Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig on Monday rejected a proposed television contract between the Dodgers and Fox Sports, invalidating a divorce settlement between Frank and Jamie McCourt and all but challenging Frank McCourt to surrender the team or sue.

Selig rejected the contract on the first business day after the McCourts announced a settlement contingent upon approval of that contract.

Selig did not strip Frank McCourt of ownership of the Dodgers. But McCourt has said for months that approval of the Fox contract was critical for the Dodgers' financial health.

 You can read the entire story here.

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Photo: Bud Selig. Credit: Bebeto Matthews / Associated Press.

Poll: Which McCourt, Jamie or Frank, would you have ruled in favor of in Dodgers case?

Now that a judge has ruled in Jamie McCourt's favor in throwing out a 2004 marital agreement with ex-husband Frank McCourt that would have left her without an ownership share in the Dodgers,  L.A. baseball fans are sure to have plenty to say about it.

So let's hear it. Do you agree with the judge's decision in favor of Jamie? Or should Frank have been granted sole possession of the team? Which decision would have been best for the Dodgers?

Vote in the poll and leave a comment explaining why you voted the way you did.

-- Chuck Schilken

Ted Green: For the Dodgers, it's always a matter of money

On Friday, a Superior Court judge with a more superior grasp of math than you and I possess ordered Dodgers owner Frank McCourt to pay his estranged wife, Jamie, $637,159 a month in temporary spousal support, plus lawyers' fees, pending their bitter divorce.

That's like $7.5 million a year. Just about what you'd pay a real good frontline pitcher, isn't it?

I know.  The Dodgers insist, swear like Tommy Lasorda, that the money being discussed in the Divorce From Hell is totally separate from the money used to run the baseball team.

"The Dodgers are not Frank McCourt's personal piggy bank," his lawyer says. So that's what they tell us and that's what we're supposed to believe.

Ahh, but if you're really True Blue, don't you suspect with more than average conviction that the Dodgers' failure to spend one red penny on pitching during the off-season is somehow connected to funds being tied up in the McCourts' big breakup?

I admit, I have no idea know how much Jamie McCourt needs to pay mortgages on seven houses plus an eighth piece of property in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. I wouldn't know what to do with seven houses, especially when the one perfectly good house we already have luckily has a laundry room and swimming pool, not requiring me to go someplace else to swim or wash my gym shorts. But, hey, homes are expensive, especially when they're in Malibu and Holmby Hills.

However, I do know by cleverly looking it up on MLB.com that the Dodgers are currently 26th out of 30 major league teams in staff earned-run average, with an ERA over five runs a game. Only four teams are worse, one of them being the Angels, keeping bad pitching in Los Angeles-area family. 

I'm guessing the Dodgers didn't spend on upgrading their wobbly starting pitching because Frank McCourt correctly figured the fans would give him a freebie this season, more placidly accept an off year or even two because, after all, the team did win the N.L. West the last two seasons, reaching baseball's final four, buying Frank a year or two, you would think, to fail on the field.