XM MLB Chat: Bud Selig's actions brought today's LA Dodgers scene

"The Dodgers owners split, and now they're headed to court to see if Jamie does actually own a piece of the Dodgers, how much of a settlement she'll get even if she doesn't, and what this means for the franchise.

Will Jamie make good on her threat to line up a group to buy the team? Will Frank ever come out of hiding now that he's moved out of Dodger Stadium?...

Laughs aside, Dodgers fans do have reason to fear the future.

The McCourts successfully sucked all of the revenue out of the franchise, which doesn't exactly make the ballclub, even with its tradition and recent on-field success, a good buy for a prospective new owner.

The McCourts added as many seats as physically possible, increased ticket prices substantially for the good seats, worked overtime to draw as many fans as possible with cut-rate prices for ho-hum seats, littered the stadium with more signage than Ebbets Field in the mid-'50s, and installed more eateries than the Food Court at the Mall of America....

Here's what scares me the most.

Since the mid-'90s, the same set of sweaty fingerprints can be found in the DNA of every single tortuous twist of the franchise -

those of one Allan Huber "Bud" Selig.

Selig can be affable and friendly and he always seems sincere, but then so could Mr. Potter in Bedford Falls.

When Peter O'Malley announced plans to sell the Dodgers on Jan. 6, 1997 - seems like yesterday - he cited estate taxes as a principal reason.

It was a reason, but hardly the first.

O'Malley simply had been marginalized by Selig since he became interim commissioner.

Selig has seized control of baseball by assembling all of the small-market owners together as a force to defend baseball against the players association. O'Malley sought compromise. Selig wanted to defeat the union, and was willing

to cancel a World Series and organize collusion against free agency, which cost the owners $280 million when the courts were done." (Criminally convicted owners recouped this by selling new franchises). ed.

(continuing, Bob Keisser): "O'Malley was exhausted. He thought the owner of a team (Brewers) acting as commissioner was a conflict of interest, plus

Selig had violated baseball's own rules by
accepting a loan from another owner,

and the Brewers' debt load had increased from $3million to $63 million between 1990 and 1996....

When O'Malley went to market, the first group to bid was Rupert Murdoch's Fox, which was in its second year as a national TV rights holder and

didn't want the team as much as its local broadcast rights.

With Selig's blessings, the sale of the franchise moved at lightning speed. An agreement in principal was in hand within five months, and Fox took over in 1998. And promptly traded Mike Piazza and turned the franchise on its head.

When Fox tired of running a baseball team, Selig found Murdoch a buyer in McCourt, who agreed to follow Selig's mandate on salary control. The sale was pushed through

even though McCourt didn't meet MLB's standard financial guidelines for ownership and ran counter to Selig's policy of "local, private ownership."

The McCourts were from Boston. The new owner bought the team on credit,

using a large parcel of land in Boston as collateral.

Fox now owns that property.

Since Day 1, the McCourt Dodgers have been a cash-poor operation even with all of the enhancements (i.e., higher prices) to the park, and now the McCourt bounty is to be split