Not at all, veteran club scout! Nothing so primitive! You'll be replaced by ScoutBot 2600. Scoutbot has a built in radar gun, an internal atomic spotwatch, bio-mechanics benchmark software that allows it to note bad mechanics in throwing and swinging, facial comparison software that allows it to recognize the Good Face and the Nearly Good Face, plus it can hook up to the internet and through advanced web crawling software scour online newspaper archives for all the games a particular player has participated in, plus advanced statistical programming that allows it to perform instant regression analyses to put those stats in context. It comes with an optional panama hat and many nicotine options: Cigar, Chain-Smoke, Chaw, or Clean.

It should be noted, though, that the ScoutBot is based off a later version of PimpBot, so in high heat it may occassional malfunction, turn your sister out, and threaten to cut you. Forewarned is forearmed!

I was writing a check out until those last two lines.

As a baseball fan and webmaster with a personal history with the McCourts, I've followed this story with interest since the beginning.

I moved to Baltimore in 1988 as a manager for Opryland, USA, who was managing 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 fishmarket). 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 Jamey, and found them to be earnest, but totally incompetent people. 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.

Stll, 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 entrace 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 unrealistic, that our people 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 Netwrk for filming shows like "Wolfman Jack's Rock N Roll Memories", etc. They did not want it to go down, and though 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 closed the doors. McCourt was never able to reopen the facility,he and Opryland sued each other (eventually, Opryland settled for a small percentage of their losses), 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.)

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 debtload 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 pet project was going to go under because of the financing of one Frank McCourt.

The Dodgers are in big, big trouble.

Primey for belfry bob....in the, most shocking behind the scenes of a team owner category.

bravo bob!

Well, it's obvious why McCourt wanted Beane or DePodesta now. "The whole player population" like hell, DePodesta will be working on the cheap again!

Every time I see McCourt's name, I always think for a sec that it's the guy who wrote "Angela's Ashes."

I think Selig was doing the same thing when the Angels were sold... he thought the guy was small potatoes, but he's spending his own money on the team.

Frank McCourt the baseball owner and Frank McCourt the author are no relation.

Yet another reason to hate Bud - I'd read bits and pieces about McCourt's highly leveraged offer but didn't think much of it, since the team owns the stadium and IS a cash cow. But the kind of information Bob detailed must have been available to Bud and his cronies, and they did nothing to stop McCourt because they wanted a cash-poor owner that would be beholden to them. Anyone want to start up another anti-trust exemption challenge? I should write a petition.

For years I would listen to the ramblings of Malachy McCourt on WYNC & WMCA.....you can still read him at the West Side Spirit

and what a job on "The Molly Macguires"!