Hello and welcome to watch.

Hello and welcome to episode nothing less than Effectively Wild

Hello and welcome to episode 2502 of Effectively Wild, a fancrafts baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the ringer. Ben, how are you?

Well, I was just catching up with our old friend, Frank McCourt, as one does.

Not the author of Frank McCourt, not Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt, the late Frank McCourt, but the current Frank McCourt.

And the Frank McCourt, people might remember as the former disgraced Dodgers owner.

Yes.

If you knew nothing about baseball,

you would probably remember Frank McCourt as an incompetent clown

and something of a spectacle

and someone who threatened to drive the Dodgers into the ground.

And that is not the end of his story, it turns out.

It has had several twists and turns since then.

But if you weren't there at the time, you might forget or never have known just how much of a spectacle McCourt's Dodgers were.

He was a real estate developer. He was heavily leveraged to purchase the Dodgers and then got in big time financial trouble

when he and his wife divorced.

And Bud Seleig appointed someone to essentially oversee the Dodgers because of dire concerns

about how McCourt was running the team.

And they declared bankruptcy at the time.

And there were all sorts of sorted stories or silly stories who could forget Vladimir

Spont, the Russian mystic who was hired by the McCourt as a sort of psychic faith healer who was paid a fortune to

...