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.”

Jack McKeon opted to give up his job in 2005 at the age of 75. He had managed the Florida Marlins to the World Series championship only two years earlier, but now he was ready to let someone else do the job. Did he regret his decision?

“Not until about two years later,” McKeon said. “I figured I needed a break and needed to get re-energized,” McKeon said. “I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve been successful. But I was getting bored. I was sitting watching three, four games each day on TV. You manage every game. I figured maybe there’ll be another chance, but people look at my age and I figured it was probably the end of the line.”

But then Edwin Rodriguez became so frustrated with the Marlins’ losing that he walked away from his job. Jeffrey Loria, the Marlins’ owner, experienced a different form of discrimination when his team played in Montreal and wasn’t about to hold McKeon’s age against him.

He directed David Samson, the team’s president, and Larry Beinfest, president of baseball operations, to contact McKeon and ask if he would come back. How long did it take McKeon to say yes? “Seventeen seconds,” he said.

McKeon’s return to the Marlins put him in a tiny historic group of managers, the only ones who managed two different teams in at least two separate terms, according to research by Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame. McKeon is the third, the first in 55 years.

Johnny Evers, the middle man in the literarily celebrated double play combo of Tinker to Evers to Chance, managed the Chicago Cubs in 1913 and for 96 games in 1921 and the White Sox for the first 21 games and the last 103 games (with Ed Walsh and Eddie Collins in between) of 1924.

Bucky Harris, like Evers a Hall of Famer, stands alone with his managerial experience. He served three separate terms managing the Washington Senators and two with the Detroit Tigers for a total 25 years.

His career also included a year each with the Philadelphia Phillies and Boston Red Sox and two years with the New York Yankees, the first of which was the World Series-winning season of 1947. The Yankees fired him after he produced a 94-60 record in 1948 but finished third, two and a half games behind pennant-winning Cleveland.

The Yankees replaced Harris with Casey Stengel and won the World Series the next five years.

Billy Martin played in three of those World Series. He would later establish himself as unique in managerial history. Martin is the only person to manage a team, the Yankees, five different times. Danny Murtaugh managed the Pittsburgh Pirates four different times.

Bill Virdon was a link to Murtaugh and Martin. Virdon replaced Murtaugh as the Pirates’ manager for the 1972 season when Murtaugh voluntarily ended his third term with them.

The Pirates had won their second World Series under Murtaugh in 1971 and gained their third straight division title with Virdon in 1972. But with only 26 games left in the ’73 season general manager Joe L. Brown fired Virdon and brought back Murtaugh.

The Pirates were only three games behind first-place St. Louis in the weak East Division, and Brown thought they might be able to steal the division title with a boost the magical Murtaugh might give the team.

“I didn’t think it was right, but I could understand it,” Virdon said in a telephone interview last week. “Joe Brown felt he had a better chance of winning the division with Murtaugh than he did with me.”

Sally O’Leary, a long time member of the Pirates’ public relations staff, said of Brown’s penchant for bringing Murtaugh back to manage, “He just trusted him and had a lot of confidence in him.”

Virdon coached under Murtaugh and was his heir apparent.

“He set me up to manage,” Virdon said. “He was one of the best people I knew in baseball. He was capable, knowledgeable and knew how to work with people.”

Brown, however, did not get his desired effect from Murtaugh in 1973. The Pirates won only half of their 26 games with Murtaugh as their manager and finished third, two and a half games behind the surprising division- champion Mets.

The Mets’ division clinching was not the only surprising last-day development that season. Having seen enough that he didn’t like about George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ new owner, Ralph Houk ended his second term as the team’s manager.

With the job open and Virdon available because the Pirates had fired him, the Yankees named him their manager for 1974. That put the impressively forthright Virdon in position to be fired 12 days after the Texas Rangers fired Martin July 21, 1975.

That confluence of events geared up the Martin carousel at Yankee Stadium, where Martin would be hired five times and fired four times, resigning once (chronologically, the first) after declaring of Reggie Jackson and Steinbrenner, “The two of them deserve each other; one’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.”

Martin made return engagements in 1979 (that comeback was announced only five days after he tearfully resigned), ’83, ’85 and ’88. Anytime Steinbrenner told reporters that he had seen the unemployed Martin and he looked physically fit, we knew he was on his way back, announcement pending.

There might have been yet another return, but Martin was killed in the Christmas Day crash of his pickup truck in 1989.

Just as Virdon served as a link between Murtaugh and Martin, Martin and McKeon were linked. Their connection came through an owner as outrageous as Steinbrenner, fellow name of Charlie Finley.

McKeon managed Finley’s team, the Oakland Athletics, in parts of two seasons, 1977 and ’78, lasting 53 games into the ’77 season and returning for the final 123 games of 1978.

“I took over the club after Charlie traded everybody,” McKeon said. “He decided to fire me but asked me to stay on as assistant to the general manager, which was him.

“That winter I was managing in Puerto Rico. Charlie called and said ‘I want you to be the third base coach.’”

Bobby Winkles, a former college baseball coach who managed the Angels for a season and a half in the early ‘70s, had replaced McKeon in 1977 and was starting the ’78 season as Athletics’ manager.

“You have to manage for Charlie to understand the way he operates,” McKeon said. “It’s a good thing we didn’t have cell phones in those days the way he wanted to control everything. Bobby evidently couldn’t take the phone calls and decided to quit.”

McKeon said that he and another veteran coach, Red Schoendienst, urged Winkles not to quit but suggested that he insult Finley with a vulgar suggestion. The idea was to induce Finley to fire him so he would be paid the rest of his contract.

But Winkles left, McKeon related, and now it was 40 minutes before game time, and there was no one to make out a lineup card. “Red said ‘you better make it out,’” McKeon said. “No one wanted to do anything without Charlie saying so.”

Just then, McKeon recalled, the telephone in the trainer’s room rang. “Red answered it and said Charlie wants to talk to you. I call him and he said ‘Winkles resigned and you’re the new manager.’”

During the off-season, McKeon said, Finley was trying to sell the team and advised McKeon to take a minor league job he had been offered. As it turned out, Finley didn’t sell the team so he hired Jim Marshall to manage, fired him after a season and hired Martin, who stayed in Oakland, his birthplace, for three years before returning to the Yankees for round 3.

McKeon, easily the oldest manager in the majors, was born in South Amboy, N.J., Nov. 23, 1930, but said he doesn’t feel 80. “I feel like I’m 55,” he said, sounding that young.

A catcher, he never played in the major leagues and said he never played above Class B in the old minor league classification system. But, he said, he was told several years ago that he is the only man to manage 1,000 games in the minors and 1,000 in the majors.

The numbers could have been higher had he accepted early offers to manage. He said he was recruited to manage while he was in college (Holy Cross, Seton Hall, Elon over nine years) by several people, including Branch Rickey, who he said told him to stay in college because education was important.

WEAVER WEAVES A TALE

A recent article about Earl Weaver’s plan to put much of his baseball memorabilia up for auction reminded me of a Weaver story I don’t believe I ever wrote.

When Weaver was preparing to retire as manager of the Baltimore Orioles in 1982, we discussed what he planned to do in the future. One thing he wouldn’t have to worry about, he said, was money. He said he had it all figured out and that he and his wife would have enough to live on.

Weaver, however, returned to manage the Orioles in 1985 and ’86, and when I asked him why he had changed his mind about retirement, he offered a simple, entirely understandable explanation.

“The economy,” he said, explaining that his financial planning had been undermined by the change in the economy. He wasn’t the only retired person to encounter that unexpected problem.

But I saw Weaver a couple of years ago and asked him how he was doing economically and reminded him of what he had said about the reason for his return.

He instantly and vehemently denied that he had ever said such a thing. Figuring I had touched a nerve of a proud man, I dropped the subject.

But I was reminded of it by a quote in the article in the Baltimore Sun.

“Weaver also dispelled any notion that he is selling his wares because of hard times,” the article said, then quoted the 80-year-old Weaver:

“Earl don’t need the money.”

A NEW RATSO RIZZO

Only 30 such jobs in the world, and within days of each other, two men walked away from those jobs last week. Edwin Rodriguez resigned from his job as manager of the Florida Marlins, and Jim Riggleman walked away from his job as manager of the Washington Nationals.

Rodriguez, in what was going to be his first full year as the Marlins’ manager, was clearly frustrated and distraught over his team’s total collapse after a promising start to the season. The Marlins lost 20 of the last 23 games Rodriguez managed.

The Nationals, on the other hand, won 17 of Riggleman’s last 23 games.

Riggleman, a veteran manager, was also frustrated but not by his team’s play. The front office, namely general manager Mike Rizzo, drove the bus that Riggleman rode to premature evacuation.

Riggleman has an option year in his contract for next season and said he asked Rizzo several times if they could discuss it. He said he wasn’t seeking a yes or no on the option, just a discussion. Each time he asked, though, Riggleman said, Rizzo said it wasn’t the right time.

It was after he asked and got that answer the last time that he decided to leave.

Some people have criticized Riggleman for what they say was his walking out on the team. That is management mentality. That is how management would like fans to think. But refusing a simple request is what caused the walkout, and that lies squarely in Rizzo’s lap.

It seems obvious that by refusing to discuss the contract clause Rizzo was saying he didn’t plan to exercise the option and retain Riggleman for next t season. If that wasn’t Rizzo’s thinking, what would have been the harm of having a discussion?

The unfortunate aspect of the development is it could hinder Riggleman’s future employment chances. I could be wrong, but I don’t think it happens the way it did if Stan Kasten were still running the Nationals’ front office. Kasten could be a management tough guy, but he understands decency.

This is a catch-up column, addressing issues I have not been able to in recent days and weeks, and No. 1 on the list is really a catch-up because for some inexplicable reason I completely missed it.

I was not aware of the remarkably misguided article The New York Times ran about Roberto Clemente on June 12 until a week later when I read three letters to the sports editor about it.

When the Times receives multiple letters about a published piece, it will run letters representative of all sides of the issue. When I saw that all three letters expressed a similar view, I figured that the piece in question had to be highly questionable.

When I retrieved it from the Times archives and read it, I saw why the letter writers were critical of the piece. It depicted a situation that was 180 degrees from reality.

“Clemente’s 3,000th hit was muted milestone in ambivalent city,” the headline read, accurately reflecting the article.

“Strange story, strange headline,” said Sally O’Leary, a long-time member of the Pirates’ public relations department, who was working in the scoreboard room at Three Rivers Stadium the day Clemente got No. 3,000.

“I don’t think it’s right at all,” she said of Tyler Kepner’s characterization of the Pirates’ fans feeling about Clemente. Kepner, usually a reliable reporter, was not writing about Clemente from first-hand knowledge. Yet to be born at the time, he relied on his assumptions and the view, also not first hand, of David Maraniss, who wrote a biography of Clemente.

Kepner seems to base much of his judgment on the size of the crowd, 13,117, at the 3,000 game. But the Pirates averaged only 17,622 per game that season.

Kepner compares Clemente and Pirates fans with Derek Jeter and Yankees fans. When Jeter gets his 3,000th hit, Kepner writes, the “stands will be packed, the news media will be buzzing, and the players will all know what is happening.”

(The last comment about the players all knowing what’s happening refers to Jon Matlack, the Mets’ pitcher, not knowing that Clemente was going for 3,000, but that’s a reflection on Matlack’s ignorance, not on Clemente and the Pirates fans.)

With the hundreds of thousands of words that Kepner and his New York area colleagues have written in recent weeks about Jeter, of course everyone will know. Jeter hasn’t had a hit recently that wasn’t celebrated by the fawning writers.

Trying to demonstrate how Pirates fans didn’t care about Clemente, Kepner quotes Maraniss, the biographer, as saying Clemente was a victim of the racial views of the Pirates’ overwhelmingly white fans.

“’Pittsburgh was the quintessential white working-class steel town, and the Pirates were seen as ‘too black,’” the article quotes Maraniss as saying.

That was generally true but not as it applied to Clemente. White fans loved him at least as passionately as white Yankees fans adore the racially mixed Jeter. Unlike Kepner, I have first-hand knowledge of that fact.

I was raised by two of Clemente’s biggest fans. My mother, to put it mildly, was a fanatic Clemente fan. He was her all-time favorite. I don’t think she ever went to bed until Clemente had batted for the last time each night. And, of course, I was a huge Clemente fan until I began covering baseball professionally.

In a crazy coincidence of timing, I remember I was staying at my old house for a family function, and my mother woke me up New Year’s morning and with great sadness told me, “Bobby’s dead. His plane crashed.” She called him Bobby because that was the name Bob Prince, the Pirates’ play-by-play announcer, used affectionately.

When I saw the Times’ piece, I sent an e-mail to a friend whom I have known since junior high school and whose interest in baseball has matched mine. I asked him about his recollections of Clemente and the fans.

“I feel the same way that you do,” David replied. “I don’t ever recall a single ‘anti-Clemente’ remark, much less ‘ambivalence’, from anyone in Pittsburgh. I know that every time I went to Forbes Field, Clemente received the greatest ovation when the line-ups were announced.

“Moreover, none of the other ‘Caribbean’ Pirate players was an object of negative characterizations. When I read that NYT article, I was almost moved to write a rebuttal expressing my first-person, eye-witness disagreement.”

“In sum,” he concluded, “to say that Pittsburgh fans were ambivalent about him is just plain wrong and wrong-headed.”

Kepner quotes Maraniss as saying Clemente “did not really win the city over completely until he died.”

Bill Virdon, who played next to Clemente in the Pirates’ outfield for 10 years and managed him in 1972, scoffed at the idea that Clemente wasn’t idolized in Pittsburgh but said, in response to the Maraniss remark, “I think it is true he got more popular but he was a very popular individual all along.”

One more point Kepner missed. With the increase of the news media and the Internet, greater attention is focused on milestones and other matters that 30 and 40 years ago got much less attention.

* * *

Great attention was paid recently to a collision at home plate in which catcher Buster Posey’s left leg was wrecked and Brian Sabean, the Giants’ general manager, practically called for Scott Cousins, the runner, to be beheaded.

More recently Carlos Pena ran over Russell Martin, the Yankees’ catcher, at the plate, and no one was hurt and no one said anything. Martin got up and showed Pena he had the ball and Pena was out. It was the way a play at the plate should be handled without anyone calling for a rule to protect the catcher.

There was one difference in the two plays. The throw to Posey came from right field, leaving him more exposed than Martin, who took the throw from left field and had a better view of the oncoming runner. But plays at the plate, wherever the throw comes from, are part of the catcher’s job description.

* * *

For three, four, five years, the New York Yankees pampered Joba Chamberlain and then pampered him some more. There were pitch limits, restriction on number of games and innings, limit on how many more innings he could pitch than the year before. All of the so-designated Joba rules, of course, were aimed at avoiding a sore arm.

Earlier this month Chamberlain suffered an elbow injury that required him to have Tommy John, or reconstructive, elbow surgery. Maybe if the Yankees had let him pitch more in his first few years, he would have strengthened his arm so that he would not have hurt his elbow, or he would have hurt it sooner and be back pitching healthy.

* * *

First, Fred Wilpon, the New York Mets’ owner, puts down the team’s exciting and productive shortstop, Jose Reyes, saying he won’t get Carl Crawford money ($142 million) as a free agent this coming winter, and then general manager Sandy Alderson asks him if he would be interested in signing a contract extension.

Alderson raised the contract question ahead of the July 31 trading deadline, presumably to help him determine whether to try to trade Reyes before the deadline rather than face losing him as a free agent and getting nothing in return.

Reyes told the Mets thanks for asking but he wasn’t interested in negotiating during the season. Good for Jose. And his agent, Peter Greenberg.

Why didn’t the Mets ask him last winter? They might have been able to sign him to an extension and avoid the free-agent quandary and the increased cost of his glittering performance this season. But the Mets weren’t conducting any business last winter.

You remember. Wilpon said repeatedly that his Madoff mess would have no effect on the Mets or their ability to do business.