Dodgers vs. Mets is Bankruptcy Bowl

No, they didn't give away coupons -- "Buy one major-league team, get half off the second!" -- at Citi Field on Friday night. Nor did they ask fans to please bring their own scorecards, ketchup or paper towels.

No, the winner didn't get a good interest rate on their next loan.

This Bankruptcy Bowl, the Dodgers at the Mets, produced no real winner. We saw it on the schedule, knew it was coming. Nevertheless, actually seeing it live -- these two jewel franchises, both facing enormous, embarrassing financial woes, sharing a field -- highlighted what a blight this dual-coast meltdown is for Major League Baseball.

"I spent 20 years there," Mets manager Terry Collins said of the Dodgers, before the Mets' 6-3 victory. "I still have a lot of friends over there. I feel very bad for them. It's a truly great organization."

One could easily voice the same sentiments about the Mets. Well, "truly great" might be a stretch, yet it is an important team.

Commissioner Bud Selig has emphatically stressed the vast differences between the Mets' and the Dodgers' situations, and to be fair, they're far from identical.

The Dodgers lead the major leagues in headaches, as their owner Frank McCourt essentially has declared war on the heads of the game. MLB executed a hostile takeover of the Dodgers on April 19, resulting from McCourt's years of comical mismanagement and misappropriation.

Poor Don Mattingly, finally getting his chance to manage, must keep together a group of players and coaches that don't know whose name will be on the bottom of their paychecks come Memorial Day.

"I'm sure up above us, those dealing with the situation, it's different," Mattingly said. "But for us on the field, it's really not changing what we're trying to do every day. I don't think it's had any effect on what's gone on here."

Mattingly, of course, knows his way around headline-grabbing owners. "Playing here, playing in this market, couldn't have done anything but help me," he said, evoking the late George Steinbrenner without even saying The Boss' name.

By blocking McCourt from signing a lucrative television-rights deal with Fox, MLB clearly wants to push the owner to sell. Should that mission prove a success, should McCourt give up without suing the league, then who's to say the new owner would even want to keep Mattingly?

Here in Flushing, meanwhile, Selig would love to see his longtime friend and ally Fred Wilpon hang on to the Mets. That just doesn't seem viable for the long term, however, when you combine Bernard Madoff trustee Irving Picard's lawsuit of the Wilpons and Saul Katz, the team's massive debt outside of that lawsuit and the Mets' drop in revenues tied to poor on-field performance.

Hedge-fund magnate Steve Cohen appeared a strong candidate to buy a minority share of the team and put himself in line to gain controlling interest. But that plan has to be jeopardized by The Wall Street Journal's report Friday that Cohen is being investigated for insider trading. Can the Mets and baseball, already beaten down, really bring on someone with this sort of cloud hovering over him?

During spring training, Selig, discussing the Mets and Dodgers, said: "I have faith that somehow . . . each year, you have a series of problems, and hopefully, next year, I'll have a different set of problems."

The commissioner surely would take on next year's problems, whatever they might be, if it meant that the Dodgers' 2012 visit to Citi Field represented nothing more than a big-market ballgame.