AMERICA AT LARGE:They may have been the city's new glamour  after the bought the dodgers, but they were not universally embraced, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

THE NEW York Yankees, who didn’t oust the Angels until Sunday night, had just a couple of days to rest up for the 2009 World Series that got under way against the defending champion Phillies at Yankee Stadium last night.

The Philadelphia team, on the other hand, cemented its position in the Fall Classic by eliminating the Dodgers a week ago.

The Phillies players were unaware of the repercussions of their victory in the losing city, but Los Angeles’ loss in the National League play-offs set in motion a whirlwind sequence of unseemly disclosures that has dominated the front pages for eight days running in a city that thrives on gossip.

Often described as “the most powerful woman in sports”, Jamie McCourt was, up until last Wednesday night, the vice-chairman, chief operating officer and president of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The job description, and the accompanying €1.5 million annual salary, may have had something to do with the fact her husband, Frank, has owned the team for the past five years.

According to Mrs McCourt, the couple had been experiencing marital difficulties, and she had agreed to postpone any divorce filing until the conclusion of the Dodgers’ post-season run.

But Frank beat her to the punch.

The Phillies were still swilling celebratory champagne in the clubhouse when McCourt announced he had fired Jamie, and in a matter of hours had changed the locks to her office.

Up until 2004, Frank McCourt was a lifelong Bostonian, but like a lot of rich people he was a fairly anonymous one who moved within his own social group and was known only in certain Irish-American circles for his charitable contributions.

That began to change a decade ago when the well-heeled real estate developer stepped up to the plate with a very public bid to buy the hometown Red Sox. A linchpin of his proposed acquisition was that he would build a new stadium on land he owned in South Boston.

McCourt lost out to the John Henry-headed group which now operates the Red Sox, in part because the new owners promised to retain, but significantly upgrade, picturesque Fenway Park (which would have been razed under the McCourt scheme).

His appetite apparently whetted by the experience, McCourt then attempted, unsuccessfully, to buy the Anaheim Angels and then the NFL Tampa Bay Buccaneers, before purchasing, for a reported €300 million, the Dodgers from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox corporation in 2004.

He and Jamie relocated to Los Angeles to be with their baseball team that same year.

But, while they had quietly gone about their business back in Boston, neither seemed to mind the instant celebrity attending their every move as Angelinos.

As the owner of the Dodgers, Frank was arguably the most prominent citizen of a city where everybody seems to be famous.

His elevation to celebrity status had some unintended consequences.

In his frequent appearances on the lecture and reading circuit, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt, who died last July, found himself frequently having to explain to his audiences that he didn’t own the Dodgers, and at least once a week Frank McCourt the baseball owner had to tell somebody No, he hadn’t written Angela’s Ashes.

The McCourts may have been LA’s new glamour couple, but they were not universally embraced. As owners go, Frank turned out to be every bit as meddlesome as Murdoch had been. Los Angeles Times columnist TJ Simers, having to his delight learned that the cornerstone of McCourt’s fortune had come when he purchased a large parcel of land on the South Boston waterfront, turned it into parking lots and spent the next 20 years counting his money, publicly dubbed the interloper from the east “the Boston parking-lot attendant”.

The nickname stuck.

When he moved, bag and baggage, from Massachusetts five years ago, it probably didn’t occur to McCourt, though perhaps it should have, that he was relocating to a jurisdiction with the most intransigent community-property laws in the nation.

In California, a divorcing couple’s assets are split 50-50 as a matter of course, and in the case of the Dodgers this could turn into a process Frank McCourt two days ago wearily described as “unscrambling the eggs”.

Jamie McCourt filed her divorce petition yesterday. Although she is a lawyer by training, in these proceedings she is represented by Dennis Wasser, Esq, who was Tom Cruise’s lawyer in his split with Nicole Kidman.

The McCourts have evidently been quietly separated since September, and, as the gossip sites have kicked into overdrive, Jamie has been linked romantically with Jeff Fuller, the Dodgers’ former director of protocol who has been variously described as both her “driver” and her “personal security assistant”.

In happier times, Jamie was routinely described in the press as the “co-owner of the Dodgers”, but Frank now claims he only “permitted such statements in the interest of family harmony”.

At some time over the past five years both McCourts apparently signed a document affirming that the Dodgers, Dodger Stadium and the surrounding real estate belonged to Frank and the two California houses to Jamie. But Mrs McCourt’s divorce filing specifically requested the court to declare that “any purported marital property agreements are null, void and unenforceable” – and in California, she is likely to be upheld.

The filing also revealed that while her paltry €1.5 million salary may be one-tenth of Manny Ramirez’s, when it comes to creature comforts she hasn’t been lacking: according to court papers, Jamie says she had come to expect, and wants reinstated along with her former job, five business lunches and five business dinners per week, travel by private jet, flowers in her office, a monthly clothing allowance of €22,366, and another €7,723 monthly for “personal care” – specifically, “hair and make-up for Dodgers events”.

Since, while the case is pending, “Petitioner (ie, Jamie) shall have the exclusive use of the indoor swimming pool between 6am and 2pm every day”, one finds oneself wondering exactly what time those business lunches are supposed to take place, as well as when Mrs McCourt intends to perform her duties as chief executive and president should she succeed in being reinstated.

None of this is likely to go down well with Dodgers fans already disgruntled by the McCourts’ history of penury with respect to the free agent market.

And the truth is, by the time this convoluted case is resolved Jamie may well be as capable of buying out Frank as Frank is of buying out Jamie.

“What does she know about running the Dodgers?” asked Simers in a column yesterday that gave him one more chance to twist the old “Boston parking-lot attendant” knife.

“Maybe she calls on her new companion . . . to advise her.

“But haven’t we already gone down that road with Georgia Frontiere?”