O’Malley Interested in Owning the Dodgers Again

 Peter O’Malley wants to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers back 13 years after selling the team to Fox.  

The franchise was in his family for 47 years, operated most of that time by his father, Walter.

But O’Malley, in his quiet way, is fed up with Frank McCourt, the owner for the past seven years, who has gone through an embarrassing divorce, engaged in an ugly battle with Major League Baseball and put the team into bankruptcy. Last week, he agreed on a court-supervised process to sell the team.

“The franchise needs leadership,” the 73-year-old O’Malley said Wednesday from his Los Angeles office. “It needs to be reconnected with the community. I think I can provide the restoration of the franchise quicker and better than anyone else. It’s a jewel. Its place in the community has always been as one of the most prestigious organizations, but sadly, that hasn’t been the case for the past few years.”

He said that he would rather turn the page on the McCourt era than talk about him, other than to say that the last couple of years “have been tough to watch.”
O’Malley sold the team for $311 million to the Fox Enter
tainment Group. At the time he said: “Fox was the ideal successor to our family. I’m at peace.”

Clearly, O’Malley is no longer at peace, but the price to restore peace at Dodger Stadium will be steep — perhaps $1 billion or more than he received from Fox — and will require that he round up investors with far more money than his family has.
“We’ve just started doing that,” he said. “Up until the announcement that the team will be sold, I didn’t join any other group although I was invited. But people had been saying to me, ‘Peter, if you start a group, I want to join.’ Now, we’re returning calls to those people who said they would join me.”