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

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

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

Then came this week.

The Dodgers, the storied concern that desegrated the sport with Jackie histrion and pioneered baseball's advise 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 sit in the $12 seats and alter a glove to every mettlesome to the ones close enough to the action 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 geezerhood 8 at Brooklyn's old 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. tone gave movie and TV roles to uranologist of Fame pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. And Mexican Fernando Valenzuela baffled hitters with his impractical in the 1980s, transfer unitedly the diverse municipality in "Fernando-mania."

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

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

Since the Beantown actual estate mogul bought the aggroup for $430 meg in 2004, the aggroup has absent through a program of hammy 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 gleaming moments in recent 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 last World Series title with a 1988 walk-off bag separate that ease stands as one of baseball's most hammy postseason moments.

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

Many assign that success to Manny Ramirez, the colorful outfielder who lit a blast under the Dodgers after the aggroup picked him up for a bargain price 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 public relations honcho and season-ticket holder of 27 years.

After onset up the Dodgers, Ramirez proven constructive for a illegal female fertility drug ofttimes utilised to mask steroid use, leading to a 50-game support in 2009.

The episode, meanwhile, created a distraction for the team, which ease managed to get added division title.

Then a large distraction hit the period after the Dodgers forfeited to the Phillies.

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

That set up an grotesque fisticuffs 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 buy the aggroup but they acknowledged he would clear downbound that debt erst he took over. The split transactions revealed that he and his spouse paid themselves Brobdingnagian salaries and bought a handful of Southern California properties.

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

Among their some incidental expenses was a six-figure gift they paid Vladimir Shpunt, a self-described scientist and expert 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 episode has mitt some fans wondering whether the Dodgers are a second-tier aggroup in a run-down stadium that has embellish increasingly chanceful — so chanceful that the Los Angeles police 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 public relations executive.

Some fans are hoping for the prizewinning with the direction change.

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