Note: I also posted this on Baseball Nation

Dodgers fans can breath a little easier into the beginning of the off season with knowing that their team will be getting a fresh face to run it hopefully in the near future. No serious baseball fan can defend Frank McCourt on any grounds, some may have sympathy for Jamie McCourt but even that is a stretch. Now with McCourt kicked out of MLB, the question that remains is; Why isn't Fred Wilpon the owner of the New York Mets not joining McCourt outside of the MLB office gates? Like McCourt, Fred Wilpon let his personal fiances affect the team. The situation for the Mets got bad enough that MLB had issued them a loan which has not been paid back. Selig has said that he isn't worried about payment which makes no sense at any level. Something tells me that if you told a bank that you haven't paid them back a dime on a loan you took from them you would get a much different reaction.

The simple answer is that Wilpon and Selig are more of a buddy buddy relationship vs Selig and McCourt's business relationship. Wilpon had been in Selig's corner since he was made acting MLB commissioner in 1992, the Mets co-owner at the time Nelson Doubleday Jr was in the small camp of owners who did not want Selig as commissioner. Some say that Doubleday's shares of the team were undercut so that Wilpon could become sole majority owner due to his opposition to Selig. However no evidence supports this theory.

Selig's actions of continuing to give Wilpon a pass do nothing but reek of a combination of nepotism and cronyism. This is at the same time that Selig also attempts to talk up about preserving the integrity and image of MLB. Both owners have run their team's into the ground while only one of them is axed and Selig wants to talk integrity. Some will say that Selig might be waiting for the ultimate decision in the Madoff trustee lawsuit which in my opinion is a cop-out. The loan from the league has not been paid back yet and the team has lost money two seasons in a row all the while still having to pay for a new stadium. No business owner wouldn't let the same management who causes them to loose money year in and year out continue to run their business. That owner would get a new manager and MLB should be no different.