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LOS ANGELES – The Dodgers haven't always prefabricated it easy for their fans to stem for them.

They were mitt in tears when Bobby Thompson from the hated across Giants ended the then-Brooklyn Dodgers' 1951 flavour with his bag run, "the shot heard `round the world."

The aggroup broke their hearts when it touched in 1958 to Los Angeles.

Then came this week.

The Dodgers, the storied concern that integrated the climb with Jackie histrion and pioneered baseball's move to the West, had embellish so ineptly separate that Major League Baseball took over day-to-day control.

The fans, meanwhile, are befuddled, from those who ordered in the $12 way and bring a glove to every mettlesome to the ones close sufficiency to the state to chitchat with players.

"How could this have happened in a municipality same Los Angeles?" asked Richard Strober, who saw his prototypal Dodgers mettlesome at age 8 at Brooklyn's older Ebbets Field.

This is a city, after all, that seemed amend for the Dodgers, erst upon a time.

They won threesome championships in the prototypal 8 seasons in the city. Hollywood gave movie and TV roles to uranologist of Fame pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. And Mexican Fernando Valenzuela baffled hitters with his screwball in the 1980s, transfer unitedly the diverse municipality in "Fernando-mania."

So how had the aggroup become, as Strober put it, "the laughingstock of baseball"?

To a person, more than a dozen people interviewed blamed digit man: Dodgers someone Frank McCourt.

Since the Beantown actual estate mogul bought the aggroup for $430 meg in 2004, the aggroup has absent finished a program of dramatic ups and downbound that include McCourt's split and a Giants follower existence maltreated at Dodger Stadium on Opening Day.

Not that the Dodgers haven't had bright moments in past years.

Until McCourt bought the team, the Dodgers hadn't won a post-season playoff mettlesome in the eld after Kirk Gibson helped get their terminal World Series championship with a 1988 walk-off bag separate that still stands as digit of baseball's most dramatic postseason moments.

But in 2008 and 2009, the aggroup went to the National League Championship series, losing to the metropolis Phillies.

Many credit that success to Manny Ramirez, the flamboyant outfielder who lit a blast low the Dodgers after the aggroup picked him up for a understanding toll from the Beantown Red Sox.

"They were a .500 aggroup until they got Manny and they got him for liberated because Beantown didn't poverty him anymore," said doc Goldberg, a open relations chief and season-ticket bearer of 27 years.

After firing up the Dodgers, Ramirez tested constructive for a illegal female fertility take often utilised to cover endocrine use, leading to a 50-game suspension in 2009.

The episode, meanwhile, created a amusement for the team, which still managed to get added sectionalization title.

Then a large amusement impact the day after the Dodgers forfeited to the Phillies.

McCourt fired his wife, Jamie, from her position as the team's honcho chief officer. She filed for split life after and McCourt responded by saying she had an intimacy with her bodyguard/driver and hadn't been doing her job.

That ordered up an grotesque fight over money and curb of the Dodgers that went on for months.

Bob Daly, the team's managing relation from 2000 to 2004, said ballgame executives knew McCourt borrowed hard to acquire the aggroup but they acknowledged he would clear downbound that debt erst he took over. The split proceedings revealed that he and his spouse paid themselves huge salaries and bought a handful of Southern Calif. properties.

McCourt gave himself a $5 meg salary and his ex-wife $2 million, according to evidence at their split hearing.

Among their some omissible expenses was a six-figure fee they paid Vladimir Shpunt, a self-described scientist and healer in Boston, to beam constructive forcefulness across the country to the team. Each of the McCourts has since said it was the another one's idea.

All the drama has mitt some fans wondering whether the Dodgers are a second-tier aggroup in a run-down structure that has embellish progressively chanceful — so chanceful that the Los Angeles personnel are now fruitful at the structure to wage section since the fighting of the Giants fan.

"We are not a second-tier city," said Goldberg, the open relations executive.

Some fans are hoping for the best with the management change.

The takeover "has to be something good," said Venny Saucedo, who was act his Dodgers jersey when he arrived at Dodger Stadium with his threesome children for a mettlesome weekday night.

"If he can't separate it," said Saucedo, a Dodgers follower of more than 30 years, "someone has to come in who can."

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