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

They were left in tears when Bobby Thomson from the hated crossways Giants ended the then-Brooklyn Dodgers' 1951 flavour with his home run, "the effort heard `round the world."

The aggroup poor their whist when it moved in 1958 to Los Angeles.

Then came this week.

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

The fans, meanwhile, are befuddled, from those who set in the $12 seats and alter a gloves to every mettlesome to the ones close enough to the state to chitchat with players.

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

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

They won threesome championships in the first 8 seasons in the city. tone gave flick and TV roles to Hall 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 grouping 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 gone finished a series of hammy ups and downbound that include McCourt's split and a Giants follower existence beaten 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 histrion helped get their terminal World Series championship with a 1988 walk-off home separate that still stands as digit of baseball's most hammy postseason moments.

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

Many assign that success to Manny Ramirez, the flamboyant outfielder who lit a fire under the Dodgers after the aggroup picked him up for a bargain toll from the Beantown Red Sox.

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

After firing up the Dodgers, Ramirez tested positive for a illegal someone fertility take often utilised to mask steroid use, leading to a 50-game support 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 lost to the Phillies.

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

That set 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 baseball executives knew McCourt borrowed hard to buy the aggroup but they assumed he would clear downbound that debt erst he took over. The split transactions revealed that he and his spouse paying themselves Brobdingnagian 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 gift they paying Vladimir Shpunt, a self-described scientist and expert in Boston, to send positive energy crossways the country to the team. Each of the McCourts has since said it was the another one's idea.

All the episode has left some fans wondering whether the Dodgers are a second-tier aggroup in a run-down stadium that has become increasingly dangerous — so dangerous that the Los Angeles personnel are today fruitful at the stadium to wage security since the beating of the Giants fan.

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

Some fans are hoping for the prizewinning 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 become in who can."

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