Team spirit

“They really are leaving,” murmurs Jamie McCourt, looking up from the owner’s box at the stands of Dodger Stadium. It’s the top of the eighth and the San Diego Padres are leading by two.

In the next seat over, her husband, Frank, has entered a cone of tense silence, broken only by the occasional hoarse shout of encouragement to whatever player is within earshot. The division race is nearing the end and the crowd is big for a Monday, loud, opinionated, clearly pumped for its still-in-first team. But it’s the eighth inning now and the Padres’ two-run lead seems to be holding.

“There they go,” Jamie McCourt says watching people trudge up the steps and disappear before turning her attention back to the game. “It’s so funny. I still can’t get used to it.”

Jamie McCourt has learned a lot about life in Los Angeles in a fairly short span of time. Since she and her husband bought the Dodgers earlier this year, she has learned that the sun really does shine here pretty much every day; that waiters, and most people, are nicer than in certain East Coast cities; that if you live in an upscale ZIP Code, one of your famous neighbors just might have a couple of very loud peacocks; that Angelenos seem to eat a lot of edamame but there is, thank God, a Krispy Kreme on Wilshire Boulevard; and that Dodger fans absolutely will leave in the eighth inning of even a crucial game to avoid traffic.

As co-owner of the franchise, McCourt has been occupied by many things other than getting to know her new city. Named vice chairman within days of the purchase, she has taken an active role in front-office decisions, including the hiring of General Manager Paul DePodesta. Although she does not have much contact with the players, she has been a major influence in the restructuring of the organization -- the chief marketing officer, the general manager and the chief operating officer all report to Frank and her.

“It’s not just baseball,” she says. “Baseball is what you sell. There are many businesses rolled into one. My job is to integrate the businesses.”

So in the seven months since she left Boston, McCourt has also learned a few other things, including what it’s like to be ripped by press and fans alike for comments that seemed to her fairly innocuous; how it feels (not good) to have columnists follow your every move with relentless criticism and unflattering sobriquets; and how strange it is to realize that many people suddenly have an inordinate interest in your financial situation and your personal life.

“That was pretty shocking,” she says. “That I was not prepared for.”

The success of the team for most of the year has taken much of the edge off the early months when McCourt and her husband, whose fortune comes from commercial real estate including waterfront parking lots in Boston, were accused by some of being penny-pinching carpetbaggers without the money or the moxie to run a baseball team. The McCourts did not, like new Angels owner Arte Moreno, lower the price of beer in the stadium, but the Dodgers are doing better than they have in years, despite injuries to their pitching staff and a highly controversial trade of the Dodgers’ beloved catcher Paul Lo Duca and valued reliever Guillermo Mota.

A diminishing lead in the National League West has created a nail-biting September, but after beating the Giants two out of three over the weekend, the team seems poised to win the division. And fans will forgive just about anything -- the Lo Duca trade, reports that Frank McCourt is considering a “naming opportunity” for the stadium -- if the Dodgers can just, pretty please, it’s been so long, make the playoffs.

If they don’t, McCourt and her husband will no doubt find themselves again under less-than-friendly scrutiny. If the team makes the playoffs, attention will be kinder but just as intense. Either way, the two, who have previously described themselves as “very private,” will have to get used to the L.A. spotlight, which can be much harsher than the glow of any stadium.

Taking care of details

And it may be harder on her than him. The couple bought the team from News Corp., but for most Angelenos, those years are already blurring into nightmarish memory. The McCourts claim the Dodgers are again a family-owned team, which means their emotional predecessors are the O’Malleys, a very different sort of couple. Peter O’Malley was a child of the game and the city; he and his wife, Annette, were fixtures in L.A. society -- among other things, Annette was a high-profile member of the Blue Ribbon of the Music Center.

Jamie McCourt is not the Blue Ribbon type. Already being described as “the most powerful woman in baseball,” she is entering unchartered territory in the cultural landscape, taking a hands-on role in a still almost exclusively male bastion. Although she says she and her husband plan to do a lot of work through the team’s Build a Dream foundation, the local organizations she has joined thus far are all business related: the Board of Commerce, the L.A. Convention Center Board, the Mayor’s Economic Council.

“I love to work,” she says. “I love making a business work.”

McCourt, who has a law degree from the University of Maryland, is known for talking, and negotiating, tough. Born and raised near Baltimore, she met Frank when they were at Georgetown University and claims she knew at first sight that they should be together; their 25th wedding anniversary is in November. They have four sons, ages 14 to 24, and after the youngest was born, she went back to school, to MIT, to get a business degree. Upon graduating, she joined her husband in his real estate development company where, for almost 10 years, she was vice president of strategic planning.

“We complement each other,” she says when asked what it’s like to work so closely with her spouse for so long. “You know how some people are big-picture? Frank is huge-picture. I am way more day to day. I try to figure out how to actually do it.”

For years, she says, it had been in the back of their minds to buy a baseball team. Frank’s grandfather owned part of the Boston Braves and McCourt was a die-hard Orioles fan. “At MIT, I wanted my thesis to be on the economics of building a new baseball park,” she says. “But none of the advisors would sign off on it. You know MIT business types: They only like the kind of stuff you can’t actually see or understand.”

Standing 5 feet 2, with golden blond hair and legs she knows are good enough to show bare and mini-skirted, she looks like the gal in the crowd inevitably described as “a firecracker.” In conversation, she is girlfriend friendly, with an unaffected habit of touching those around her -- bumping shoulders with a staff member, laying a hand on Tom Lasorda’s wrist. During the press conference announcing the purchase, she says, she was so nervous that announcer Vin Scully held her hand under the table.

But she radiates that high-density energy that comes only through discipline -- McCourt is the sort of woman who easily juggles cellphone and Blackberry, who keeps her son’s school schedule with her at all times so she can tell him which class he has next should he call her, which he does; the sort a woman who can have a huge bowl of M&M;’s on her desk and eat only five a day.

“I’m a very real kind of person,” McCourt says, her Maryland childhood showing in the long and narrow Baltimore O’s, the sudden flat N’s and M’s. “And I don’t plan on pretending to be someone I’m not.”

So far, McCourt says, she and her husband have been much too busy with the team to even think about what sort of profile they want in L.A. society; she has yet to even host a dinner party at her new home. “It’s embarrassing,” she says. “We keep getting invited places -- dinner parties, premieres, and we have to say no because they’re all at night and we’re, well, busy at night.”

“I keep telling every one ‘in November, in November,’ ” she adds, “but I’m afraid that by then no one will be talking to me because I keep saying no.”

Life on the Left Coast

Back East, McCourt was high-profile in a “The 100 Most Powerful Women in Boston” sort of way. McCourt will tell you that she learned early on about the vagaries of celebrity, from her father, who was the Crazy Eddie of his day, doing wacky commercial spots for Luskin’s, the eponymous string of appliance stores he owned throughout Maryland.

“People were always coming up to him in restaurants, at the grocery store,” McCourt says. “I could never understand why people would be interested in a normal person just because he was on television.”

But there’s a difference between selling refrigerators, even a lot of refrigerators, and owning a major league baseball team. Just as there’s a difference between living large in Boston and living large in Los Angeles.

“We were always very, very private people,” she said during an earlier lunch downtown at which Gary Miereanu, the Dodger vice president of communications, did not leave her side. “So [all the attention] was a real eye-opener. I mean, we’re not the players. To us it was just business.”

In her mind, the comments that led to her public excoriation -- she told a Los Angeles Times reporter that it was “crazy” the team had not made the playoffs in recent years and that they should be drawing 4 million fans each year instead of 3 -- were just common sense. “I was not criticizing the former owners,” she says diplomatically. “But they sold the team and we bought it, so obviously there would be changes. We want to better serve the players and the fans.”

Since then she has pretty much stayed out of the press, partly by choice and partly because of illness -- in July, she contracted a terrible infection in her right eye when the scar from an old surgery opened and bacteria from tap water entered her cornea, leaving her all but blind in that eye. It was painful, frightening and, she says, the timing could not have been worse. Then, she says, reporters called, wanting to do a story on the infection. “A story. On my eye. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, this is not how I want to be known -- as ‘the lady with the eye.’”

Though a slight cloudiness on the eye is visible under the stadium lights, the damage to her vision has not affected her gaze, which is direct, attentive and gives very little away. Before the game, she huddled in her office with a friend from Boston who was pitching her on investing in an arts and crafts product his wife had invented. “I love being an angel investor,” McCourt says. “Its one of my hobbies.”

With the exception of the 2 1/2 weeks when she had to put painful drops in her eye every single hour, McCourt hasn’t missed a game. After her two youngest sons arrived in L.A., she stopped traveling with the team, although she, Frank and three of her sons attended last weekend’s series in San Francisco.

When the players are on the field, she says, her main job is to sit next to Frank so that no one tries to talk to him; it’s a good job for her because she’s a good talker, serving up maternal anecdotes, updates on her eye.

She is far from star-struck by the glamour her new city offers -- she chose her Westside neighborhood based on proximity to her sons’ school and has been surprised, she says, by some of the local, um, lifestyle choices: Several noisy peacocks belonging to a neighbor recently got loose, chased down the street by men with nets. “Not something you see in Boston,” she says. And when she asked a neighbor to recommend a local doctor, she got an “L.A. Stories” type answer. “She gave me the name of a gardener, a housekeeper, a person to blow dry my hair, a masseuse.... I said, ‘You know, I just want a doctor.’

“That was before the eye, of course,” she says with a sigh. “Now I know lots of doctors.”

Not that McCourt is unused to the high-end, well-connected life -- she brought her longtime housekeeper with her from Boston and when a police helicopter was hovering around her house, she picked up the phone and called an old friend, L.A. Police Chief William Bratton. At home.

“He gave me a lecture about security,” she said. “He said, ‘This is Los Angeles. People will come up and try to get in your yard, look in your windows.’ That’s something to get used to. People didn’t come up and look in your windows in Boston.”

Still, McCourt is determinedly enthusiastic about her new life. “I am now the biggest L.A. booster in the world,” she says. “I tell all my friends back East, ‘You know how we always wondered why people would live out here? Now I know. Because it’s paradise.’ ”

But even paradise needs a little work; the McCourts say they have ideas for improving the stadium and various businesses done there. “We want it to be more family-friendly,” she says. “We want to get the players out more.... We just want to do what’s right for the team and the town. But in the end, it’s a business.... We knew it was going to be a turnaround, and it will be.”

But it’s a business she and her husband can imagine owning for the rest of their lives. “I just love this,” she says on the evening of the game against the Padres, settling back into her seat, which is just to the left of home plate. “I love that I can hear it all, the sound the ball makes in the glove, the bat when it hits the ball -- you can tell it’s going to be a home run just by the way it sounds. I can’t believe this is my job.”