LOS ANGELES (AP) - The Los Angeles Dodgers and Major League Baseball announced Tuesday that they have agreed “to a court supervised process to sell the team.”
The agreement also includes the sale of team media rights “to maximize value for the Dodgers and their owner, Frank McCourt,” according to the joint statement.
The Blackstone Group LP will manage the sale process.
The agreement caps a tumultuous year for the Dodgers and tenure for McCourt.
In April, MLB took the extraordinary step of assuming control of the Dodgers, a team increasingly paralyzed by the bitter divorce of McCourt and his wife, Jamie, who had served as the team’s CEO until he fired her in 2009.
The Dodgers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in June, after McCourt claimed that Commissioner Bud Selig’s rejection of a media rights deal left him without the funds to meet the team’s payroll.
McCourt and Selig had been scheduled to testify at a trial this week, but the court postponed the proceedings to allow settlement talks to proceed.
The new owner would be the third since Peter O’Malley sold the team to News Corp. in 1998. The Dodgers had remained in the O’Malley family since Walter O’Malley moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.