McCourt divorce trial begins with a paper trail

LOS ANGELES – Amid citywide sentiment that no outcome will benefit the Dodgers, and having already made national spectacles of themselves and their revered baseball organization, Frank and Jamie McCourt take their multi-million-dollar quarrel to trial Monday.

First up, Jamie McCourt. Her attorney: former Time magazine “Lawyer of the Year” David Boies. Their first witness: estate-planning lawyer Leah Bishop and drafter of post-nuptial documents. The judge: Scott Gordon, who is hearing the Mel Gibson-Oksana Grigorieva-baby Lucia child support dust-up, last month insisting Gibson surrender his firearms. The conversation: the authenticity of the handful of marital property agreements that surfaced after the McCourts separated more than a year ago.

Hours later, a few miles up the road from Stanley Mosk Courthouse, the Dodgers will play for their playoff breaths.

That’s a lot of intrigue for one courtroom, even in L.A. So, in the days leading to trial, they got a bigger courtroom. Apparently the Hollywood Bowl wasn’t available.

McCourt vs. McCourt, Case No. BD514309, will determine who gets what from a personal fortune once estimated at $1.2 billion (including the Dodgers), a lifestyle that included tens of thousands of dollars in hair care and clothing expenses (for her, too), a relationship that alleges infidelities on both sides, and a shared rancor that threatens it all.

Folks in Los Angeles, who six years ago took in the strangers from Red Sox country with a wariness that bordered on suspicion, watched for the past 10 months the comedic ugliness of the rich scrounging for pool houses, country club memberships and time in the beautician’s chair. They saw a house (or six) divide. They wondered about the four grown children, how this must look and feel to them. They measured drawn legal documents against state community property laws, but not for very long.

The McCourts barely got here and already they had engaged in a divorce that, if not the most expensive in state history, will almost certainly be on the podium.

What remains to be answered haunts tried-and-blue residents here from the Palisades to Pacoima: “This doesn’t mean Jamey Carroll(notes) will be our left fielder next year, does it?”

It’s really all about the Dodgers, whether Frank McCourt is sole owner (as some of the MPAs stipulate) or shares them with Jamie McCourt (as others do), and whether the Dodgers will remain in the McCourt name no matter how the case is decided. And then, possibly, appealed. For, sigh, years.

Meantime, payroll has fallen, Vicente Padilla(notes) started opening day, manager Joe Torre is considering retirement, and paperwork emerged that indicates the plan is to continue cutting payroll into the middle of the decade.

Fans waited 20 years for another winner, got one, then found it came with such dysfunction to be barely worth it. Their Dodgers are being outspent by the Minnesota Twins. Their Dodgers are being outplayed by the San Diego Padres. Their Dodgers began to look like a mixed-up, messed-up fireball of ego, old grudges and greed, the two of diamonds in the McCourts’ game of billion-dollar-ante Three-card Monte.

The possibility of the McCourts running aground financially has an inevitable feel to it. That it would come so spectacularly, before a judge who’d presided over cases including Britney Spears, that it would trample the boundaries of civility, has been almost too much to bear.

From the October playoff game going on a year ago, when Frank reached out and playfully brushed his soon-to-be-ex’s head in the owner’s field-level box, causing her to recoil in horror before a stadium full of people, their personal dispute has become more public by the day. Neither, according to court filings, has budged. She wants half. He wants the Dodgers. When they recently took a stab at a settlement, Jamie asking for a smaller lump sum (less than $100 million, according to a source) in exchange for a percentage of future Dodger revenues, Frank, a source said, neither accepted nor countered. He left in a huff.

So, onward.

Partly by design, the trial schedule leaves room for reconsidering. They’ll meet four days this week, then reconvene Sept. 20. They could settle in those weeks. They could choose to trudge ahead.

The trial boils down to a custody battle, with the Dodgers as the kid in the middle, and the kid getting more withdrawn by the day.

They have much to gain, and lose. Frank wins, and the Dodgers are his. Jamie wins, and the Dodgers are theirs, presumably to sell.

Either way, all that would be remaining to determine is how the Dodgers win.