You would probably not want to invite Bud Selig and Frank McCourt to the same party, no more than you would invite Frank McCourt and Jamie McCourt to the same party. Of course, the McCourts would offer a better reason to engage socially with them. They were married.

The only vows Selig and McCourt might exchange would be oaths of a profane nature.

Selig was delighted last year when Tom Hicks was forced to sell the Texas Rangers. He will be ecstatic when McCourt sells the Los Angeles Dodgers.

I know I’m getting ahead of myself here by writing that McCourt will have to sell the Dodgers. But there seems to be no other resolution to the mess McCourt has created in Los Angeles. If the Dodgers are to survive as a competitive team, as they have always been as long as any of us can remember, they need a new owner. It won’t happen under McCourt, the destructor.

It was the same way with Hicks in Texas. Despite the Rangers’ improvement while Hicks was still the nominal owner last year, they were doomed to a dismal existence with Hicks.

It was the same when Vince Naimoli owned the Tampa Bay franchise. It wasn’t financial difficulty or bankruptcy that doomed Naimoli. It was incompetence. Selig was thrilled to see him go, too, and now the Rays have one of the best teams and organizations in baseball.

Debt and incompetence did Hicks in, and now the Rangers are thriving under Nolan Ryan.

I first experienced McCourt a few years ago when I had breakfast with him before an owners’ meeting in New York. His answer to a question I asked him served as a tipoff that this was not a man to be reckoned with.

This was just after Arte Moreno, the owner of the American League Angels of Anaheim, had hijacked, usurped, seized – choose the term you like best – the name of the Dodgers’ home for 50 years or so. Most people thought nothing of it, but I found it to be ludicrous and insulting to fans’ intelligence.

I asked McCourt at breakfast why he hadn’t fought the Angels’ appropriation of his team’s name and geography.

“I have more important fights to fight,” he said.

He didn’t say what those fights were. He wasn’t yet estranged from his wife, Jamie, so he wasn’t referring to divorce. He wasn’t yet fighting with Selig so that wasn’t it.

I walked away from the table thinking this man simply wasn’t a fighter. He’s fighting now because he has no choice. His life, his manhood are at stake. He staged the bitter divorce fight for the same reasons.

When McCourt’s fight with Selig began, he claimed that the commissioner was trying to get him out of baseball. I have to admit that some of the things Selig said and did looked like that. But soon the evidence began building that McCourt had damaged the Dodgers badly enough that he had to be reined in or thrown out.

One charge against McCourt is that he made personal use of Dodgers’ revenue. Owners long before McCourt charged major expenses to their teams. George Steinbrenner charged travel expenses for his company, American Shipbuilding, to the New York Yankees. Calvin Griffith and other members of his family charged meat for their home use to the restaurant at the Minnesota Twins’ park.

Those expenditures, however, didn’t approach McCourt’s use of Dodgers’ revenue.

A major league official said McCourt told baseball investigators he had used $182 million for his personal expenses. The official added that the amount might have been as much as $182 million and that he owed Jamie McCourt $200 million.

In addition, the official said, McCourt could be in debt by as much as $800 million. Hicks owed banks $575 million when he filed for bankruptcy last year.

I sought a telephone interview with McCourt through the Dodgers’ vice president for communication, Josh Rawitch, but he didn’t respond to my e-mail. Selig returned my call but said the case was in court so he couldn’t comment.

However, in a statement earlier in the week, Selig said, “The Commissioner’s Office has spent the better part of one year working with Mr. McCourt and his representatives on the financial situation of the Los Angeles Dodgers, which was caused by Mr. McCourt’s excessive debt.

“My goal from the outset has been to ensure that the Dodgers are being operated properly now and will be guided appropriately in the future for their millions of fans. To date, the ideas and proposals that I have been asked to consider have not been consistent with the best interests of Baseball.”

Filing for bankruptcy, Selig added, “does nothing but inflict further harm to this historic franchise.”

In a court filing, on the other hand, McCourt said he had secured loans from lenders “who lack the agenda and animus of the commissioner.”

“The commissioner has poisoned the relationship” between the Dodgers and Major League Baseball, the papers added, and the “inescapable conclusion is that the commissioner will stop at nothing to force a change of ownership.”

Earlier this year, Selig rejected any comparison between McCourt and the Dodgers and Fred Wilpon and the New York Mets, who face financial crippling by Wilpon’s investments with Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi schemer.

Wilpon, though, has found a minority investor, who is willing to put $200 million into the Mets. There has been no indication that McCourt has sought minority partners with an infusion of cash.

“He can’t find a partner,” the major league official said. “He has stripped that franchise.”