Potential Buyer of the Dodgers Lacks the Hometown Advantage

In that first magical moment that I heard that Frank McCourt wanted to buy the Dodgers, I was dazzled.

I spun out a bright scenario: McCourt the Irish American, the boyo who wrote “Angela’s Ashes” -- the new master of Los Angeles’ own boyos of summer. I’ve had dinner with Frank McCourt; I think the Blarney stone kissed him instead of the other way around. He’s a spellbinder who could make even a seventh-inning stretch enthralling.

He could summon his brother Michael from San Francisco, where he tends bar, to pull some brews in the Dugout Club.

He could remind everyone that he and his brother Malachy were born in Brooklyn, which should shut up all the carpers and yappers who are still boo-hooing over da Great Dodger Robbery. Oh, I had it all figured out, I did.

Then the penny dropped. This wasn’t my Frank McCourt, but another one -- Boston fella. Rich guy, at least by bean-and-cod standards. Owns a huge parking lot, which in L.A. is as good a pickup line as having your own well is in Houston -- “Hey baby, wanna go check out my parking lot? Four hundred spaces, a buck every 20 minutes, but tonight it’s just you, me and the valet. Whaddya say?”

I say no. No thanks, Frank.

As early as Thursday or as late as Saturday, we should know whether baseball’s team owners will let Frank McCourt of Boston -- who’s already failed to get his hands on the Red Sox and the Angels -- join their little club and buy the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So: The guy who wants to buy the team doesn’t have the cash, so he’d borrow it, and Fox, which wants to dump the team, will lend him money to buy it?

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To puzzle this out, I called up Roz Wyman. She was the powerhouse City Council member who helped L.A. land the Dodgers in the first place, and who has worshiped them from her front-row seat ever since, when she can get away from all the Democratic pols seeking her advice.

What do you make of this McCourt business, Roz?

“He may be the nicest man in the whole world,” she began, “but the thing I can’t understand is, Fox says it wants to sell the Dodgers. OK, then, the first thing they do is loan the man who wants to buy them the money to buy them because he doesn’t have enough.” But the sale can’t be loan-heavy, so Fox effectively becomes a partner, which means it still owns a team that it wanted to dump. “Does Fox want to sell or not want to sell? There’s no logic in it.”

What matters most to Roz is that the Dodgers not finish last, which she’s afraid could happen if this deal goes through, because all those loans mean there’d be no money left to buy players, and they might as well put Roger Owens the peanut vendor on the mound -- which come to think of it would probably be fine by the other baseball team owners. You conspiracy theorists out there, are you listening?

Tomorrow, Item 61 on the Los Angeles City Council’s agenda of 64 items is a resolution by Councilman Jack Weiss asking Fox to please sell the team to a local.

That would be Eli Broad, No. 45 on the Forbes 400 of rich Americans. (McCourt didn’t make the cut.) If I ever need cash for some little enterprise of my own, I’d wangle an invitation to chez Broad and go through the sofa cushions and find it.

Broad has made it clear he can write the check right now for the same $430-million price -- Houdini money-leveraging. Broad has stepped in to save L.A.’s civic honor before, reviving The Diz, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, when everyone else was ready to call the coroner.

L.A. is getting used to just handing Broad a pair of epaulets and a sword and calling him the cavalry -- which is just as well so long as Mayor Jim Hahn seems to have abdicated the bully pulpit of office for a pew back in the Amen Corner.

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Maybe this big-talking McCourt guy could make a go of it here.

L.A. has had its share of big-talking men. Some of them stuck citrus on the spines of Joshua trees and passed them off as orange trees. But calling it an orchard didn’t make it so. By the same token, putting Adrian Beltre in Dodger blue and calling him a Hall of Fame third baseman doesn’t make it so, either.

And Boston seems a little too eager to get rid of McCourt, as if he were the Trojan Horse in a Brooks Brothers three-piece: “Looky what we’ve got -- this fabulous wooden horse! Yeah, we’ll just go off now and leave it here for you-all. Enjoy!”

Boston Globe columnist Steve Bailey has begun, tongue in cheek, “The McCourt Appeal, designed to help our parking lot attendant realize his dream of owning a major league team -- only not here. We’ve seen enough. It’s someone else’s turn.”

Bailey is still accepting donations and is, he says, “willing to write the first check.”

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Haven’t these financial wizards and their helium loans already led us into enough trouble? A federal deficit closing in on a half-trillion, the leveraged deals, the finagled WorldCom-Enron-Adelphia financing that crashes and burns? The sleight-of-hand borrowing in Sacramento and a new governor who wants the voters’ OK to borrow another $15 billion just to see us through?

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s put most of his investments in a blind trust, but I still think he should stake a few spare million to put the Dodgers in local hands.

Even with four pro baseball teams in Cullyfornia, a guy who’s faced down killer cyborgs is surely brave enough to choose a team to cheer for.

I am famously not a baseball fan. Football is my game; after the Pro Bowl, I hang black crepe over my Lombardi shrine until August. I keep the Dodgers’ schedule taped to my dashboard -- but only to know when I’d have to dodge home-game traffic.

But I am an L.A. fan, and I think that the Dodgers, like the Green Bay Packers, should be locally owned by fans through a stock corporation. And I don’t think Frank McCourt is the man to make that happen.

I’m not sure what he really wants from baseball, but I do remember this:

George W. Bush borrowed most of the money he needed to buy a baseball team called the Texas Rangers, and the next thing we knew, he wound up as president of the United States.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com. Her earlier columns can be read at latimes.com/morrison.