Opinion: Getting a piece of the Dodgers’ action, one Angeleno at a time: Could my wish finally come true?
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Can I say ‘I told you so’?
More than seven years ago, just as Frank McCourt was being talked up as the new Dodgers owner, I was beating the drum for public-share ownership of the team.
Well, what do you know: There’s now an own-the-Dodgers movement and a website, ownthedodgers.com, to make them the Green Bay Packers of Major League Baseball, like that hometown football team that’s so beloved in the frozen reaches of Wisconsin in part because some of the locals, yea, verily, unto the umpteenth generation, own a piece of it.
Here’s a bit of what I had to say in January 2004:
‘I am famously not a baseball fan.... I keep the Dodgers’ schedule taped to my dashboard, but only to know when I’d have to dodge home-game traffic. But I am an L.A. fan, and I think that the Dodgers, like the Green Bay Packers, should be locally owned by fans through a stock corporation.’
When I first heard back then that somebody named Frank McCourt wanted to buy the Dodgers, I was, tongue in cheek, all atwitter (in the classic sense of the term) at the prospect that a renowned Irish author would be on the corporate mound. Wrong Frank McCourt. Now I suspect we would have been better off had it been the author of ‘Angela’s Ashes’ who bought the Dodgers rather than the man who may leave the team in ashes.
Roz Wyman, who as a young City Council member was instrumental in bringing the Dodgers here in the first place, told me presciently in 2004, ‘Fox says it wants to sell the Dodgers. OK, then the first thing they do is loan the man who wants to buy them the money to buy them because he doesn’t have enough.’ All those loans, she worried, meant there’d be no money left for the players.
As I wrote, they might as well put Roger Owens the peanut vendor on the mound.
And Boston, it seemed to me then, seemed mighty eager to get rid of the McCourts, the Trojan horse shoved right up the City Hall steps -- ‘Looky here, L.A., pretty horsey! Just for you! Enjoy! Buh-bye!’
As for Angelenos even getting a chance at ownership, this would be harder to accomplish than getting John Boehner to vote for ending tax cuts for the rich. Can you imagine an entity like MLB agreeing that a team, and especially one in the second biggest media market in the country, should not be a monster profit-making machine? And would agree to any arrangement that put money anywhere but into some owner’s already fat bank account?
If Angelenos could be stockholders, we could, all of us, guarantee that the team wouldn’t pick up and move someplace else. If Angelenos could be stockholders, fan loyalty would soar, and so would attendance. As Angelenos could own the Dodgers in the fashion that Green Bay owns the Packers, dividends would go back into the team and the stadium -– better players, better conditions, better prices.
And if I owned even so much as a smidgen of a pinch of a fraction of a morsel of a share, I might come to love baseball as much as I love L.A.
OK, yeah. I know. Only one miracle at a time.
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-- Patt Morrison
